Nick Broomfield spent an hour at Hay today discussing clips shown from last year's successful (artistically, at least) drama Ghosts (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0872202/) as well as previewing his next effort, Haditha; a dramatisation of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians (http://www.theguardian.com/Iraq/Story/0,,2076586,00.html) by US Marines in late 2005. It should come out in September, but from the five minutes or so that we saw (http://www.barneybroomfield.com/videos/23/Battle_For_Haditha) it looks like it could be something very special indeed. Following three groups, the Marines, the insurgents and the innocent bystanders that become involved, we see a roadside bomb being planted and detonated and the repercussions for the inhabitants of local tower block as the Marines return for revenge. A man is heard shouting into a radio, "they're unarmed." He has to shout or otherwise his voice would be drowned out by the sound of the American machine guns filling crammed rooms with bullets.
Broomfield was never a documentary maker that interested me. Too smug, mock-clumsy and obvious. He went for targets that I had no interest in; either too irrelevant (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138563/) or too obvious (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111469/). All that changed with Ghosts. The initial journey is astonishingly powerful; one Chinese woman travelling for six months across the world, on lorries, wandering over mountain borders and finally drilled into a wooden box at Calais until she finds herself in London. She then sleeps in a crammed room paying exorbitant rent and in economic slavery as she find herself in the ancient trap running up more debt with those that own her than they pay her, working for bribed temp agencies before the final and fatal decision by the gang leader to have his effective slaves take up cockle-picking work in Morecambe
Necessity forced Broomfield to accidentally create a new genre; he couldn't film actual illegal immigrants as their eligibility removed their willingness to participate. Instead Broomfield did all the research he would normally do for a documentary, talked to everyone involved and charted out exactly what happens to a Chinese worker who comes over and precisely what happened to the cockle-pickers in 2004 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/3827623.stm). He didn't then just write a script and hire Nicole Kidman to do her best Madame Butterfly, but took people who had lived that life to recreate it for camera. A new way of making a documentary was born; one; it would be called the docudrama if that hadn't already been taken by the late 1990s fetish for airport check-in and driving school reality soaps.
Haditha promises more of the same. The marines are all ex-US military and everyone else are Iraqis now based in Jordan where Broomfield did his filming. Broomfield has spent months in pre-production reading reports, talking to journalists, locals, marines and anyone else he can to make sure his depiction of what happens is as real as possible. It will never be exactly what happened on that terrible day but, as Broomfield explained, "the essence was accurate," and from this first glance at Hay it could well be the first classic film to come out of the horror of this war.
