"War Tapes" Movie Puts Cameras in Soldiers' Hands

Mark Anderson
for National Geographic News

June 1, 2006

In March 2004 filmmaker Deborah Scranton started receiving raw war footage via email.

Scranton was then just beginning work on a documentary in which her cameramen filmed half a world away from her New Hampshire studio.

Some of them had never used a video camera before, but all of them had been trained to shoot.

The cameramen were also actively deployed U.S. National Guard soldiers in Iraq with Charlie Company of the 172nd Infantry Regiment (Iraq profile, maps, music).

Scranton's finished film, The War Tapes, is the first commercially released movie filmed by soldiers. It is also the first war film to be directed from the other side of the planet via email and instant messenger (IM).

Winner of the Tribeca Film Festival's Best Documentary award, The War Tapes opens in New York on June 2 and is slated to open in select other U.S. cities through early July.

Steve James, director of the Academy Award-winning film Hoop Dreams, edited and co-produced the documentary with Academy Award-winning producer Robert May.

James stayed with Scranton at her New Hampshire farmhouse, and he recalls his colleague often being on email and IM.

"Whenever that IM ping on her computer went off, she would rush to the computer to see if it was one of [her cameramen]," he said.

Virtually Embedded

The movie began with a flash of inspiration, Scranton says. The veteran journalist had been offered the chance in February 2004 to be an embedded reporter with the New Hampshire National Guard when they deployed to Iraq.

(Related news: "National Geographic TV Reporter Embedded in Iraq" [2003].)

"I just woke up in the middle of the night, wide awake as could be, with the idea to give the soldiers cameras instead—in effect to virtually embed," she recalled.

Scranton quickly formed a production company with executive producer Chuck Lacy and bought the cameras and equipment they needed.

"We put our credit cards together," she said.

Within a fortnight she had traveled to the U.S. Army's Fort Dix, New Jersey, to recruit her cinematographers.

Sgt. Zack Bazzi remembers first meeting Scranton during the lead-up to his company being shipped out to war.

"We were about two weeks away from deploying to Iraq," he said. "Deborah just dropped in with a couple members of her crew and … articulated her vision for us, which was basically for us to record our own experiences. And she would just put them together in a raw, unbiased way."

Ten soldiers signed up to film their experiences in Iraq. Five ended up filming the entire year of their deployment, and Scranton and James chose three of these soldiers to focus on for the film.

The three—Bazzi, Sgt. Stephen Pink, and Specialist Michael Moriarty—may technically have been rank amateurs behind the lens.

"I'm a good soldier, but I'm the least mechanically inclined human being," Bazzi said. "It had an 'on' button, and you pressed it and it turns red. A green circle comes on in the camera, and then I know it's running."

But critics are hailing their workmanship as some of the most compelling filmmaking to emerge from a modern theater of war.

(See a related photo of a dust storm in Iraq snapped by a U.S. Marine Corp Gunnery Sgt. in 2005.)

Spontaneous Drama

Bazzi brought a unique perspective to the soldiers' story, as a Lebanese-born American who is fluent in Arabic.

"My language allowed me to bridge a cultural divide," he said. "We worked with various institutions of the new Iraqi government to help them get on their feet. [My language skills] allowed me to better do my job."

At times, however, that job put him into uncomfortable situations.

The War Tapes chronicles one incident outside of Fallujah in which Bazzi was ordered to keep Iraqi civilians outside of a perimeter that went down the middle of a road.

On the forbidden side of the road was a hospital.

"A father came up with a [sick] son in his hands," Bazzi recalled. The father pleaded with Bazzi to let him take his son to the hospital.

Bazzi understood, but decided not to speak—that would have meant telling the father he must deny medical attention to his son.

"If you occupy people and you do that to them, ultimately you're going to make [insurgent] fighters out of them," he said. "I just walked over to my Humvee … I just didn't want to be the messenger for that one."

To highlight these moments of spontaneous drama, James and Scranton had to sift through and edit about 800 hours of raw footage returned from Iraq.

"As in any really successful documentary, what you pray to happen is all these unexpected things that you could never in a million years ask for or imagine," James said. "That's when you know the documentary gods have smiled on you."

Moriarty, for instance, took his camera into the "equipment graveyard" at Camp Anaconda in Iraq where combat-decimated vehicles are stored.

"Every one of these pieces of equipment that's damaged has a story behind it, and you can imagine the story," Moriarty narrates as his lens surveys the bombed and charred wreckage.

"That was someone's father or someone's mother or somebody's son. Or daughter. It goes on and on and on."

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