Last week I got a chance to watch a documentary on a band living in the war zone. My local bar was hosting a screening of Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which Vice Productions recently released on DVD. If there were a soundtrack to the war in Iraq, it would likely consist of some seriously loud, pissed off heavy metal. And so it was with Baghdad’s heavy metal: the kick drum hit like a car bomb knocking through a building, and sometimes the double bass pedal sounded like hovering Apache helicopters. The screeching guitars were reminiscent of bombs being dropped from the sky, and the snare drum mimicked sniper fire. The bass guitar shook my insides like tanks driving throughthe room.
The music, coming from the practice space of the only heavy metal band in Baghdad, sounded like an imaginary war, but when the band members walk
outside they step into a heavy metal reality. It’s 113 degrees in Baghdad as I write this, and for a while the average number of Iraqis killed daily was 300. These people are living in a hell-like war
zone.
The interest in a heavy metal band from Iraq started when writer and TV correspondent, Gideon Yago, wrote an article for Vice magazine in January of 2004 called “No War for Heavy Metal,” highlighting the work of Acrassicauda, the name being a Latin word for “the black scorpion,” – the most dangerous scorpion in Iraqi deserts. Inspired by the article, director Eddy Moretti and producer Suroosh Alvi took a trip to Baghdad to find out more about this band.
Metal documents the ongoing struggles of the band and their daily lives in Baghdad. The band’s members, Firas, Marwan, Faisal and Tony, grew up listening to Metallica and hoped someday to meet the same success as their idols.
Things aren’t so easy for an Iraqi band, though: They have to power their amplifiers with gas generators and carry guns to get to their practice space. They have even received threats from other
Iraqis for being “Americanized.” People there are just like anywhere else: they don’t like what they don’t understand. The majority of Iraq does not understand heavy metal.
But the band says they play metal because they live in a heavy metal world. They seem to be correct. Outside their doors are the troops and the terrorists, and they are stuck in the middle. When
they played shows under Saddam’s regime they were told they had to have a song about Saddam Hussein or they could be imprisoned for life. So, out of necessity, they wrote a song called “The Youth of Iraq,” glorifying Saddam. When asked about the song they quote an old Arabic saying: “To stay away from the devil, sing for him.”
In July 2005, Eddy and Suroosh flew into Baghdad from Beirut and organized a concert for Acrassicauda at Baghdad’s Al Fanar Hotel. They soon found out head banging is not allowed; in fact,
you could be imprisoned forever for it. Iraqis can’t even grow their hair long because they would be seen as the bad guys and could be killed. They played to a group of fans wearing Megadeth
and Sepultura t-shirts who said that the show was the only fun that they could have in their city.
In August of 2006, Eddy and Suroosh went back to Baghdad to see if the guys were still alive. At that time over 300 people per day were dying in Iraq.
Even wearing an American band shirt in Baghdad could get you killed. The band lived moment to moment and they didn’t expect to be alive for long.
The crew had to smuggle themselves through Kurdistan and then catch a flight into Baghdad. After landing in Baghdad, the first thing they were asked was if they had used guns before. They
were then handed flack jackets and told to expect to be shot at. They were also not allowed to wear seat belts –an obvious sign of a foreigner. They had to travel the seven most dangerous miles of road in the world, where snipers and roadside bombs are common; the crew was rightfully nervous.
Much of the film’s production cost was spent simply getting the crew to its destination safely: For $1,500 per day an Iraqi security company gave them a bullet proof SUV, another car without armor, two drivers, two shooters, and one translator. There was a 9 p.m. curfew every night in the city, and when describing how hot it was Suroosh said even at night it felt like a hair dryer was being held to your face.
Band mates Faisal and Firas are best friends and live fifteen minutes away from each other in Baghdad, yet, when they got together for the interview, they had not seen each other in six months. When the crew arrived in Baghdad,
Tony and Marwan had already fled to Syria. Soon into the interviewing the band mates revealed that their practice space had been destroyed by a SCUD
missile just a month earlier.
After staying a few days with the band, Suroosh and Eddy returned to New York, but four months later in December of 2006 Suroosh was emailed by the band who said they had gotten back together
in Damascus, Syria and were going to play a show. Faisal, Firas, and their families had taken a very dangerous 16 hour bus ride from Baghdad to the Iraqi border. 3,000 people per day had been
leaving Iraq at that time.
The band played a show in a small cafe in Damascus without a very good turn out, but when they played a Metallica cover the crowd got excited. That show was as close as any of those fans would get to seeing their favorite songs performed live. Soon after, Firas, Marwan and Faisal had no option but to sell their instruments for life’s necessities.
Another worry was that Syria had been trying to send refugees back to Iraq. All of their attempts to obtain foreign visas had been denied and they were losing hope.
When Marwan, the drummer, was asked about music he said that if he could not play the drums as hard and as fast as he could, he would probably
kill someone. By the end of the film the band was still trying to find its way to a place where they could live in peace, grow their hair long, bang their heads and play heavy metal again.
This film opened my eyes a little wider to the situation in Iraq, and afterwards I felt terrible for its citizens. They have done nothing to deserve the hell that they are stuck in. If they leave they won’t be able to work in other countries legally, so some are forced to stay.
Metal is a great first-hand account of what life is really like over there, and the footage is real and in your face. The special edition DVD is out now with lots of bonus features that includes a follow up 45-minute documentary called Heavy Metal In Istanbul, which shows what the band is doing now. They have fled to Istanbul together and are still trying to make the band work despite the fact that they are heavy metal refugees.
Many people have been forced to find shelter in other countries because of the chaos in which Iraq has found itself. This film helped show that real hopes and dreams are being stolen from the
Iraqi people, while their homeland is being destroyed.
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