A personal favorite of mine, this film is available at the UCSB Davidson Library.
In the summer of 2011, I spent nearly four months in Amman Jordan with my wife who was part of a group of Arabic Language students from California. A friend of ours who was also a student, noticed a store clerk wearing a tee-shirt promoting an obscure metal band from Norway. In broken Arabic and English, the pair played snippets of songs from their tiny phones. The visit to the corner market had transformed into a competitive yet friendly display of Heavy Metal fanaticism.
What happened that evening was unexpected and memorable. Out of the hundreds of people that we had encountered in a major city over the entire summer, he was the only metalhead that we knew of. This film reminds me of how we (as foreigners) identified with the alienation felt by a local citizen.
From the website:
Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a feature film documentary that follows the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda from the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the present day. Playing heavy metal in a Muslim country has always been a difficult (if not impossible) proposition but after Saddam’s regime was toppled, there was a brief moment for the band in which real freedom seemed possible. That hope was quickly dashed as their country fell into a bloody insurgency. From 2003-2006, Iraq disintegrated around them while Acrassicauda struggled to stay together and stay alive, always refusing to let their heavy metal dreams die. Their story echoes the unspoken hopes of an entire generation of young Iraqis.
http://www.heavymetalinbaghdad.com/home.html
-James
Though I have yet to see this film, the subject matter is very dear to my heart as a longtime fan of metal. One of the things that is so interesting about metal is in its ability to captivate and create such fervor in its niche, but extraorindarily loyal fanbase. To be sure, there are certainly diehard fans of most musical genres, but the intense passion and sense of community that has arisen from metal, among its' multitude of genres, is unique in the musical world. This passion becomes a very powerful tool of not only creativity, but can also be used as instrument of positive social change and unity within a society fraught with strife, which is what I'm assuming Acrassicauda
ReplyDeleteTwo documentaries that also explores the uniquely metal devotion to genre are
"Such Hawks Such Hounds"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-njKCr6ieKE
which goes into the history of doom, sludge, stoner, and drone metal and gives a glimpse into the genre's strong sense of community and reciprocity
and
"Black Metal Satanica"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VTbr1WQm4
which has a really extensive look into black metal history and its infamous subculture, showing the darker things that the devotion that metal inspires can bring about.
There's also the more popular "Until the Light Takes Us", which moreso looks into black metal culture and its ideologies than the music, though its hard to recommend due the number of inaccuracies in it. Still, it's entertaining and gives the viewer a pretty good impression of the the genre's culture and its fans.