Variety’s Review of THE LIST
After seeing THE LIST’s World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend, Variety’s Ronnie Scheib made our day by filing this review: The Lord High Executioner in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Mikado” gloats about his “little list” of future victims, but Kirk Johnson totes around a bigger one in “The List” — several huge binders’ worth. On it are names, credentials, commendations and profiles of Iraqis whose faithful service on behalf of various U.S. forces and agencies have exposed them and their families to terrorist reprisals. Though the pic traces Oskar Schindler-esque heroic actions by a lone American in a fight for justice, its effectiveness stems equally from the autonomy it grants its Iraqi protagonists. Strong docu should hit theaters prior to smallscreen play. While opposed in principle to the invasion of Iraq, Johnson felt his extensive knowledge of Islamic culture and fluency in Arabic compelled him to join the… LEARN MORE
IndieWire Highlights Female Directors at Tribeca Film Festival
Associate Producer Nathan Tisdale reflects on the importance of female directors. I was glad to see Melissa Silverstein’s article on IndieWire pick out the films directed by women at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Reading her recent posts about the stagnant growth of female directors in film, I am proud to see Beth Murphy and her fellow female directors featured. These women bring a unique voice to documentary and narrative filmmaking. Melissa identified a solution to reverse the trend of underdog women directors – start talking about them and championing their films! Tribeca will be a good place to start.
THE LIST is on to Tribeca
With THE LIST heading to the Tribeca Film Festival for its World Premiere, I want to thank my incredible team for everything that went into making this film over the past 4.5 years. We faced many challenges, and now I want you to enjoy all the rewards of your hard work. There have been great contributions made by so many: DP/Editor Kevin Belli, Executive Producers Charles Sennott and Nick Quested, Producer Sean Flynn, Composer John Califra, Graphic Artist Peggy Foley, Story Consultant Nina Gilden-Seavey, Associate Producers Beth Balaban, Alyssa Gantz and Nathan Tisdale, and dozens of talented photogs, production assistants and interns. I also want to thank Kirk Johnson and all the Iraqis on his list who shared their often harrowing–but always inspiring–stories with us.
Fledgling Fund Grant
We’re proud to announce that we’ve received a grant from The Fledgling Fund for educational outreach with THE LIST! The Fledgling Fund gives support to media projects that help to change the lives of at-risk and marginalized groups and communities. Out of 326 letters of inquiry that Fledgling received, THE LIST was one of only 22 grantees selected. This funding will be used to create a core standards-based curriculum and study guide with Columbia University Teachers College, and to build our partnership with veterans who are overcoming issues of PTSD. Thank you Fledgling for your continued and unwavering support! And congratulations to all the other grant awardee – it’s an honor to be in your company.
Recording THE LIST’s Score in Prague
We’ve just returned from our trip to the Czech Republic, where we recorded the orchestrated tracks of our original score for THE LIST in a studio just outside Prague. As Kevin and I walked in we were stunned when we heard John’s compositions played by live musicians for the first time. It’s unbelievable to me that we had forty members of the Czech Philharmonic recording tracks for our film. It’s something we’ve never experienced before and I don’t know how we lived without it. Our composer, John Califra, has really inspired us through the score he’s composed. It’s unified the vision that Kevin and I have had for this project since the beginning. John said it best, “This is about Kirk and what he’s done as an American being [in Iraq]… He represents an ideal of what [America] pretends to be but isn’t.” John’s vision for this score has always… LEARN MORE
Principle Inspirations: Characters
Thanks to our anticipated trip to Prague to record THE LIST film score with members of the Czech Philharmonic, I am re-reading the masterful “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” In this passage about “characters” I’m reminded of how we as documentary filmmakers make decisions about those we feature in our films: “…characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about… The characters… are my own unrealized possibilities… an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”
Principle Voices: Kevin on THE LIST edit
Kevin Belli is Principle Pictures’ Senior Editor and Director of PhotographyA whole day of editing, that’s how a typical day at Principle Pictures looks like for me, these last few months. I come in and review what I’ve done the day before. I try to macromanage myself and set daily goals. You can get really overwhelmed when you think about an hour long film for example. Every scene is like its own little film and it has to make sense in the context of the bigger story.The most important thing for the rough cut is establishing structure. Beth Murphy (Director) and I will sit down and work out the film’s structure. The order information is presented, the order of the scenes, how the information is shared, how much information is being revealed… all of that establishes the pacing of the film. I like to think creatively about how to tell… LEARN MORE
We’re on the Move!
When Kevin and I return from Iraq, we’re coming back to our new office in Boston. Plymouth has been our home since I founded the company in my basement over 10 years ago. There’s a lot of pride, countless memories, and a ton of tapes packed up in that U-Haul that’s making its way up I-93 North today! So thankful to everyone who made it happen — Sean, Alyssa, Beth (Balaban), Kate, Danny, Jim (Sean’s Dad), Alyssa’s Dad, Andrew, and Dennis!! You all completely and totally rock!
Electricity Revolution
Next to me on the couch is a plastic bag filled with samoon, the eye-shaped Iraqi bread that Umm Muhammad brings every morning—warm and soft. Now it is hardened from sitting in the hot sun all day. There’s a baseball bat resting nearby—put there by Carmen, a foreign correspondent and our housemate, who uses it to smack the flat bread over the front yard wall. On the other side, it lands with a soft thud, momentarily enveloped in a burst of dust. Even though Jadriya is the most exclusive area of Baghdad—it’s where President Jalal Talabani lives—the streets are dirt and littered with trash. And the electricity is out, again. From my seat on the living room couch that’s been moved outside, I can’t see the children playing on the street beyond the wall, but I can hear them—their shouts muffled by the constant hum of generators. “Generator city,” our… LEARN MORE
A) Magic Wand B) Bomb Detector C) Magic Wand Bomb Detector D) None of the Above
Every day people tell us to be careful. That’s because every day the bombs going off across the country make it into the news. Many of them are in Baghdad. Most of them are car bombs. Just today 27 people were killed. Officials have known for a very, very long time that stopping car bombs is a top priority. That’s why they invested in expensive bomb detectors, and outfitted every checkpoint with them. When I say expensive, I mean more-than-the-price-of-your-car-expensive. They’re between $20,000 and $60,000 a pop. And when I say every checkpoint, I mean the roadblocks that are set up about every ten feet or so. Seriously, it’s hard to go more than a minute without encountering a checkpoint. That means every car driving through the city has dozens of opportunities to be sniffed out for TNT and other explosives that will turn the vehicle into a deadly inferno…. LEARN MORE
Blog V Doc
These stories I’ve been sharing — and will continue to share — from the road often have very little to do with the actual subject matter of the documentary we’re filming. That’s intentional. I don’t want to give the whole story away, and I’m contractually obligated not to! Filming here has all the highs and lows I enjoy about the roller coaster filmmaking business itself. The common wisdom among journalists is to come in wanting 100%, expect 75%, and settle for 50%. Good thing I came in wanting 200%, so now I only have to settle for 100%. We’re filming every day, and so is a local crew we’ve hired. They are incredibly hardworking and talented, and the cameraman’s back story is fantastic. Remember when the guy hucked a couple shoes at President Bush when he visited Baghdad at the end of 2008? Yasser, our local cameraman, is the guy… LEARN MORE
Sights and Sounds of Baghdad
The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men.The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen. – Abul Tayyeb al-Mutanabi Ever hear a new sound — one you’ve never heard before but you know you’ll never forget? It happened to me once in Etretat, thanks to the shingle beach. The new sound then? Water crushing the small stones. And it happened to me again today, thanks to a coffee vendor who turned his two porcelain coffee cups into castanets while walking up and down Mutanabi Street. Central Baghdad’s Mutanabi Book Market — it’s named after a classical Arab poet, so it’s not surprising that this is considered the intellectual capitol of the city. Scholars, students, soldiers and shopkeepers come to buy and sell magazines, maps, magnifying glasses, prayer beads, video games, stuffed animals, and–of course–books. There aren’t too many women around, but men are hanging out… LEARN MORE
Agony of De-Feet
Good thing Kevin brought all those anti-inflammatories… Not a good day for our driver, either. This happened on the streets of Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan (in northern Iraq) just before he was pulled over by the cops for an illegal turn. We’re heading back to Baghdad first thing in the morning where, ironically, it may feel a bit safer.
I Think We’re Going to Need a Bigger Tunnel
The trip to the military’s media social should have taken about 5 minutes. But since the bus transporting us (17 international journalists) couldn’t fit through Slayer Tunnel, we enjoyed the 45-minute scenic tour through Baghdad’s Victory Base Camp… past the True Value Hardware store, Paris Boutique and bowling alley… alongside the never-ending rows of concrete T-walls… and, finally, a right onto Vigilant Road toward the opulent Al Faw Palace and “the juicer” (see picture below – don’t you wish you had a massive orange?). As I met and mingled with our military’s impressive key leaders and senior staff on a beautiful deck overlooking Saddam’s “Water Palace,” a band (whose sole purpose is to increase morale around the country) played hits from the Eagles and Pink Floyd, and some guys hit golf balls into the lake. Our conversations were interrupted by this request: please bow your heads, the chaplain will now… LEARN MORE
GPS Tracker
Before leaving for Iraq, I was thinking that it’d be great to implant a GPS tracking device… in my arm or leg, behind my ear. Anything external can be taken from you, and there are certain areas that mandate alerting others about your whereabouts. Video Above: Martin Chulov from the Guardian alerted London about our travels into Abu Ghraib.
Hard Core Rural Iraq
We headed west out of Baghdad today – toward Anbar Province, birthplace of the Sons of Iraq movement. Also known as the Awakening Council or Sahwa, the Sons of Iraq are Sunni Arabs who once took up arms against the United States, but then joined forces with us to fight Al Qaeda. Iraqi officials refused to let us into the area without a military escort. “If you go in there alone, you won’t make it out alive,” the Baghdad Commander told our translator on the phone this morning. (Picture Above: Kevin gets into an Iraqi Army humvee) Here’s what we knew going in: A man and his two sons were shot to death at their home in al-Zaidan village, a farming area of Abu Ghraib. This is still like Iraq’s Wild West. Suspicions were that the killers got the wrong guy… that they really wanted the dead man’s brother who… LEARN MORE
Events of the Day
Here are some of the things we’ve experienced over the last 24 hours: Weather.com called for: Widespread Dust. And there was – thanks to a sand storm last night that blanketed everything (including our laptop computers!) in a thin layer of dirt. Lots of masks being worn on the streets today – which have an eerie orange glow. A cockroach in our house was so big, we weren’t sure whether to kill it or charge it rent. Our housemate, Carmen Gentile, did the deed, smashing the beast with his flip flop. Carcass remains at the bottom of the stairs. (As you can tell from our living room below, we do have lots of room for extra house guests.) This afternoon we heard about a killing in Abu Ghraib (the rural farm area, not the city). Information we had linked the victims to America, and we wanted to learn more. Our… LEARN MORE
The Winged Man
“Let’s meet at the Winged Man,” or “See you at the Winged Man in 20 minutes,” or “The driver is almost at the Winged Man, let’s go.” Such is the talk around travel to/from the Baghdad International Airport which we did yesterday to meet General Fadel Barwari, the commander of the Iraqi Special Operation Forces (ISOF). The Winged Man is a statue of Abbas Ibn Firnas, Iraq’s very own Icarus. Back in the first century, Ibn Firnas tried to fly by sticking feathers onto a wooden frame (like a glider). He didn’t succeed. But he didn’t die either. And I think that’s the best way to sum up our last 24 hours. We didn’t accomplish much. But we didn’t die either. And, hey, Ibn Firnas had a crater on the moon named after him! After a quick start out of the gate our first day here, we’ve been humbled by… LEARN MORE
Welcome Back to Baghdad
There’s a saying here in Iraq that goes something like this, “Money is your country.” What it means is: If you have money, you can feel at home everywhere you go. As soon as we touched down in Baghdad, it was clear that airport employees spend a good deal of time trying to make money their country. And we were an easy target. Too many cameras. Not enough paperwork. It was 119 degrees in Baghdad today. And there is no amount of dryness that keeps that from feeling anything but suffocating. Between the heat, two days of travel, and our extended stay, we thought we’d ease ourselves in. I had definitely led Kevin (D.P.) to believe that today would be a “get yourself acclimated” kind of day. But ten minutes into his afternoon snooze, I pulled the plug on acclimation. Sheikh Moustafa al-Kamal Shabib, a leader in the Sons of… LEARN MORE
Principle Pictures News
There has been a lot going here in Plymouth in the last couple of months! We received a grant from the Cinereach Foundation for our film What Tomorrow Brings, which is still in the early phase of production. Due to the success of working with our interns throughout this year, we’re starting a more structured Intern Program – offering local students the opportunity for a hands-on experience in the world of documentary. The Promise to Freedom is taking form – we are currently cutting a rough cut of the film. As we watch the stories take shape, we are more excited than ever about the project. Stay tuned for more PP news! It’s going to be a busy summer.
The Forgotten War
Dahr Jamail, an independent U.S. reporter in Iraq, wrote recently on his site about the Iraq war as the ‘Forgotten’ War. As Afghanistan takes center stage in the U.S. media outlets, the occupation of Iraq takes a backseat. Yet, 130 thousand American troops and 114 thousand private contractors still remain in the country and approximately 400 Iraqi civilians continue to die each month. In addition to a lack of electricity and drought in-country threatening 2 million people with the possibility of no power or water, an astounding 4.5 million Iraqis have been displaced as refugees in other countries.
TED Conference features docs – including The Promise of Freedom
Thanks to support from the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, our new film, The Promise of Freedom, was featured at the latest TED Conference. Mariane Pearl (activist, author and Exectuive Producer of the documentary, Resilient), Trevor Neilson and Michael Massing led a discussion about how filmmaking and journalism can help promote tolerance, hope and progress.
Indonesia and Australia Absorb Illegal Refugee Overflow
The number of Iraqis and other refugees from Afghanistan, Iran and Burma fleeing to Indonesia has greatly increased from 369 in 2008 to 2,504 in 2009. Refugee candidates applying to the UNHCR for resettlement must wait in a first country of asylum to be processed. Indonesia is a choice location due to the ease with which tourist visas can be procured. Additionally, a thriving human smuggling business provides transport for asylum seekers from Malaysia to Indonesia by boat. When the wait is months or even years, desperate refugees can pay up to $8,000 instead to be transported to the northernmost shores of Australia, thinking the chances of resettlement are better. Host countries struggle to deal with the problem of illegal refugees, while meanwhile refugees labor for freedom and a better life.
Access to Federal Benefits for Iraqi Military Interpreters
Congress has finally fixed a poorly drafted law that had barred Iraqi translators who came to the United States on Special Immigrant Visas from receiving the same federal benefits given to refugees and asylees. Special Immigrant Visas or SIVs were created by Congress in 2007 so that Iraqis whose lives were in danger because they worked for the U.S. military as translators could be quickly evacuated to the United States, bypassing the normal refugee processing. Last year, immigrant advocacy groups discovered that, due to drafting issues in the federal law, many of these SIV holders are legal permanent residents who are now subject to the five-year bar on federal Food Stamp/SNAP benefits, Medicaid, TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), employment services and not eligible for Social Security. For SIV holders, the current federal law permits only 8 months of the Refugee Resettlement Program (RRP) and all other federal benefits, and… LEARN MORE
