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CREATED:20061018T205400Z
DESCRIPTION:500 MILES TO BABYLON \ndirected by David Martinez and produced by Juliet 
 Dervin \n\nPROJECT NARRATIVE\n\n500 Miles to Babylon is a one-hour 
 documentary film currently in post-production about Iraq under U.S. 
 occupation. Narrated by the filmmaker, using footage shot in Iraq during 
 the past year threaded with graphically animated archival sequences to 
 provide historic context, the film will address the current war not simply 
 as a conflict over petroleum profits or a scheme to fill a company’s 
 coffers, but as part of a larger American imperial project.\nThrough 
 impromptu interviews, glimpses of daily life, still photographs, and 
 footage of car-bombs, demonstrations, night-time graffiti artists, Sufi 
 rituals, and the celebrations following Saddam’s capture, 500 Miles To 
 Babylon will reveal the complex situation in contemporary Iraq through a 
 personal lens. Far from being a simple anti-war movie, 500 Miles will 
 attempt to illustrate the terrible complexity of a people brutalized by a 
 dictatorship, and the catastrophic results when that system is changed 
 overnight by shortsighted military means.\n500 Miles is also the story of 
 director David Martinez, an American independent filmmaker in Iraq, 
 attempting to understand the country and its ever-changing situation. One 
 chapter of the film will relate his experience in Fallujah where he 
 temporarily abandoned his camera and was part of an ambulance crew fired on 
 by U.S. snipers, only to be taken prisoner later by mujihadeen fighters in 
 the same city.\nMartinez first visited Iraq in Fall 2003. Then, he found 
 that some people (though certainly not all!) were optimistic, if guardedly 
 so, about the U.S. occupation. Their loathing of Saddam Hussein was greater 
 than their skepticism of U.S. foreign policy.\nHowever by April, when he 
 returned, he found that the barometer had swung the other direction. Iraqis 
 who had formerly been patient about the worsening problems in Iraq were now 
 completely opposed to the American presence. A crucial threshold had been 
 crossed, and this change will be part of the film’s trajectory.\n\nWHY 
 TALK ABOUT HISTORY?\n\nThe story of Iraq did not begin in February of 2003 
 when the United States embarked on its latest military venture in the 
 region. Nor did it begin in 1990 with the first Gulf War. Iraq has been at 
 the center of the Western colonial imagination since it was created as a 
 nation at Versailles, France in 1919.\n500 Miles, therefore, will use 
 animated still photographs and archival video to illustrate the modern 
 history of Iraq, its genesis as a British colonial project and the 
 not-so-ironic way in which it has come once again, eighty-five years later, 
 to be at the “ground zero of imperial ambitions.\nA ‘rough cut of the 
 film is anticipated for February of 2005.\nEn 
 sh’allah.\n\nhttp://www.graffitifilms.com\n\nSneak Preview ... this 
 Friday Night\nOctober 20th @ 8pm\nStation 40, 3030B 16th near Mission and 
 BART\n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/10/18/18321318.php
SUMMARY:500 Miles to Babylon, Screening
LOCATION:Sation 40, 3030B 16th Street @ Mission
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/10/18/18321318.php
DTSTART:20061021T030000Z
DTEND:20061021T050000Z
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