Film on Iraqi Heavy Metal Band

From the New York Times
May 22, 2008
Headbangers From Iraq, Thrashing and Waiting
By MELENA RYZIK

It was already an unlikely story: Around 2000, a group of Iraqi school friends weaned on bootleg Metallica and Slayer tapes formed their own metal band with an imposing name, Acrassicauda (derived from the name of a species of black scorpion), and an appropriately do-or-die attitude.

They rehearsed in a basement in Baghdad and dreamed of playing Ozzfest and having long hair. Though their kind of music was essentially verboten under Saddam Hussein’s regime, they managed to perform a few times for several hundred fellow headbangers and considered themselves a center of the (deeply) underground hardcore scene.

When their country was plunged into war a few years later, they lost a lead singer — he fled to Canada — but gained a new audience in Western journalists eager for some local color. Vice magazine, the downtown bible known mostly for its sneering outlook, profiled the band in its January 2004 issue, drawing attention to its perseverance in the face of increased security risks; no matter what, it seemed, Acrassicauda was committed to rocking out. In 2006, the company’s managers, sensing a bigger opportunity, traveled to Baghdad for what was intended to be a punchy short video starring the group, being billed as Iraq’s only heavy-metal band. Instead they turned the footage into a feature-length documentary, “Heavy Metal in Baghdad,” which opens for a weeklong run on Friday in New York and Los Angeles. (A DVD will be released June 10.)

A blend of “Behind the Music”-style back story and amateur guerrilla war reporting, the film follows Acrassicauda from 2003 to 2006 as the four remaining members struggle to stay together even as Iraq falls apart. Their rehearsal space is bombed, their audience dwindles and eventually, they, too, flee to Syria, then to Turkey. Two years later, filmmakers and band have remained committed to one another and to the youthful idealism of the movie (as expressed through a devotion to pounding riffs and shrill lyrics, of course).

“It was life-changing, nothing short of,” Eddy Moretti, 36, a director of the film, said of making it. In addition to helping the band, he said, “the big ambition is to get people to change the discourse on the war a little bit, to get people started talking about, wanting to know about, the Iraqi refugee situation.”

His co-director, Suroosh Alvi, 39, said that making the movie was a no-brainer. “There were just so many elements that I felt like we were tailor-made to do, especially writing about music for so many years in the magazine, it got really boring after a while, ” he said. “I would say it was one the most creatively satisfying projects I’ve ever worked on.”

They used the project to inaugurate VBS.tv, Vice’s Viacom-backed online video network, last year and to reposition the Vice brand as a more serious endeavor appropriate for the posthipster, globally pluralist era. (And it is still macho enough to keep the attention of young men, said Ken Sonenclar, managing director of DeSilva and Phillips, a media investment-banking firm.) But for Acrassicauda’s members, now living in exile on Vice’s dime in Istanbul, the life change was not uniformly positive.

The band’s three unmarried members — Marwan Hussain, 23, the drummer and designated spokesman; Tony Aziz, 29, the lead guitarist; Faisal Talal, 25, the singer and rhythm guitarist — and a cat share an apartment over a kindergarten. Firas Al-Lateef, 27, the bassist, lives with his wife and young son nearby. They have not seen their extended families in nearly two years.

Their refugee status means they can’t legally work, and their Iraqi passports and other political hurdles have made it impossible for them to travel. (They missed screenings of the movie at the Toronto and Berlin film festivals over the last year.) They don’t speak Turkish. Though they have played a few concerts, they don’t draw much of an audience on their own.

“We’re isolated, literally isolated,” Mr. Hussain said by telephone. (The members all speak English, and most of their songs have English lyrics.) “We ain’t got nothing much to do back here,” he continued. “It’s kind of expensive to go out, so we prefer to stay at the house, facing each other all day and night. Like, same old, same old.”

The band’s outlook was very different in 2003, when Mr. Alvi, a co-founder of Vice magazine 14 years ago, and Mr. Moretti saw raw footage of an Acrassicauda show in a soon-to-be-bombed hotel shot by Gideon Yago, the MTV personality. At the time the band members were hopeful that a regime change might allow them more freedom to thrash.

Mr. Alvi and Mr. Moretti decided to go to Baghdad and tried a few official channels, like getting visas through Iran, to no avail. In part because they wanted the footage to be ready for VBS.tv in early 2007, they had little choice but, in typical Vice fashion, to just wing it. In September 2006 they bought one-way tickets from Frankfurt to the Kurdish region of Iraq and flew to Baghdad from there. They stayed eight days, but didn’t tell their families about the trip until they had returned. Friends at more traditional media outlets helped them with logistics, like hiring security and finding hotels.

“We had our business cards and these fake laminates that we made; they just said, like, ‘VBS News, journalists’ with our photos on them,” Mr. Alvi said. “We would show them to people, and they would laugh at us.” Nonetheless, they managed to get around, and to a YouTube-primed audience the film’s sense of D.I.Y. gung-ho-ness can be charming, if not always on point. The movie cost $75,000 and a lot of favors.

The filmmakers were also not overly concerned with context or objectivity. At a party after a screening of the movie at the New York Underground Film Festival in April, Mr. Moretti admitted that he didn’t know why the band members got into metal in the first place. (To appease a reporter’s questioning, he then tried to drunk-dial the band in Turkey. There was no answer.) Instead he and Mr. Alvi focused on capturing the band members’ experiences as metalheads first, and as Iraqis second — the way Acrassicauda preferred.

“When we started the band we never said, ‘Oh, we’re from Iraq, maybe we should take advantage of it, be like circus freaks,’ ” Mr. Hussain said. “We’re just like normal people, passionate about the music.”

Heavy metal appealed to him for the same reason it has drawn millions of adolescents the world over: pure, honest rage. “The life there, it doesn’t give you much choices and options,” he said. “We find that heavy-metal music at first is a release. Later when we got more mature about it, we found we can actually use it as a good guide to direct and to say whatever you want, as loud and as fast as you can.”

The aspiring-rock-star tenor of “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” changes, though, when the band escapes to Damascus and the members’ political status as refugees becomes clear. (Mr. Aziz’ family is in Syria now; the others’ extended families are still in Iraq, Mr. Hussain said.) “Being in Damascus, you can see us thinking seriously about our lives, the world — everything is kind of heavy,” Mr. Hussain said.

For now Acrassicauda is stranded in Istanbul, where Vice helped the members relocate in the aftermath of some threatening e-mail messages they received after the movie’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. Vice also bankrolled them with a few thousand dollars through fund-raisers and promotions like a Converse ad about “true originals.” Mr. Alvi, Mr. Moretti and others at Vice are working with the United Nations to try to secure travel visas so Acrassicauda can tour.

In what Mr. Hussain described as the only exciting development of the band’s time in Istanbul, Acrassicauda recently recorded three songs in a studio (underwritten by Vice), though the group is frustrated by not knowing when it will be able to perform them live. “For us, our life is the band,” he said. “The music is the only true thing that happened in our life, that we believe in. We still have hope that one day we’ll be able to establish something. All that we need to do is wait.”