I don’t care how tired of Iraq documentaries you think you are–you need to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Executive produced by Spike Jonze in conjunction with VBS.tv (the online video venture of VICE Magazine, of which Jonze is creative director), the film tells the story of four years in the life of Acrassicauda, allegedly the first (and probably the only) Iraqi heavy metal band. It’s the first piece of media I’ve seen that potentially has the power to break through “Iraq fatigue” and actually get American kids to care about the decimation of Iraq and the ensuing refugee crisis.
Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti (co-founder of VICE Magazine and head of VICE Films, respectively) had been following the Acrassicauda saga for three years before ever meeting the band members. MTV’s Gideon Yago wrote a story on the band for VICE in 2003, and two years later, the magazine sponsored an Acrassicauda show in war-torn Baghdad. At that point, the situation in Iraq was already so epically bad that between death threats, blackouts and US military red tape, the show almost didn’t happen, and when it did, Alvi and Moretti found themselves locked out in Lebanon. A year later, fully aware that the violence in Baghdad was escalating on a daily basis, the filmmakers embarked on a trip to Iraq, “to see if [the band members] were still alive.” The week they departed, a TIME Magazine cover story on the war ran with the headline, “Life in Hell.”
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the boys of Acrassicauda were reasonably fun-loving, apolitical kids (in an early scene, the drummer says he changes the channel every time something about the war comes on TV), who were more or less able to eat their metal hearts out–as long as they respected Saddam and steered clear of head-banging, which can be mistaken in the Muslim world for Jewish prayer. But as the war drags on, their real-life circumstances begin to imitate heavy metal mythology: separated from one another by streets full of fire, corpses and (maybe most dangerously) justified paranoia, in five years the band is only able to play six shows. By late 2006, these educated, middle-class twentysomethings are “rock n’ roll refugees,” struggling to hang on to a less-than-zero existence in Syria after literally running for their lives from Baghdad.
