As though their lives depended on it... Iraqi rock band Acrassicauda play in Baghdad. Photograph: Chris Hondros
There's something about being in Austin, Texas, during South By Southwest that makes you lose track of time. Maybe it's the fact that the entire town feels like it's been taken over by the festival. The streets are filled with people wearing lanyards, their passes providing access to parties. And it's there that you truly forget about the outside world because, hey, life's all about having a good time, listening to great music and meeting cool people, right?
So might say the members of Iraq's first - and only - heavy metal band, an outfit so unlikely as to not be believed, were it not for the fact that for the last three years some film-makers have been following their lives. The feature documentary Heavy Metal In Baghdad is a startling, funny, in parts depressing look at the struggles a group of young Iraqi men have in trying to maintain their band. Not so much a rockumentary as a film documenting their attempt to stay alive - and together - in war-torn Iraq, it's a microcosm of the plight of an entire nation. One cannot fail to be moved by their predicament.
Film-makers Eddy Morretti and Suroosh Alvi featured the band in Vice magazine and wanted to follow their progress. The film opens with them putting on their flak jackets as they arrive in Iraq to meet the band, the two of them clearly daunted by the risk to their lives. In contrast, Faisal, Firas, Marwan and Tony - the impoverished yet optimistic members of Acrassicauda (Latin for black scorpion) - state casually that they're "used to seeing dead people everywhere". Images of bombs exploding on the city's horizon are juxtaposed with the thrust of a drumstick as it thrashes a bass drum: this is a film about the struggle to make music as well as the struggle to survive.
After Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in 2003, there was a brief glimmer of hope for the band. Free from the repressive regime, now they could play music whose very existence had previously put them at risk (even head-banging could get you arrested). Soon after, their country disintegrated around them into a bloody insurgency, and between 2004 and 2007 Acrassicauda fought to maintain the band as well as their own lives. Against all odds, they still manage to perform, their amps powered by unstable generators, their instruments constantly examined by security forces. During one gig they sing about the "massacre of a generation", and it's hard not to feel moved as you hear bombs pounding the buildings outside the venue. You wonder what effect this constant destruction is having on the people living through it.
This isn't a political polemic. It's not an anti-West film arguing for the removal of troops. Instead it achieves something almost impossible in the current media climate: it creates real empathy for its subjects by exploring the personal effects of living in a war zone. We in the West are now almost numbed by the regular, edited, televised images of devastation and carnage broadcast from Iraq, so it's ironic that some of the most powerful footage of the film is seeing the band in tears as they watch video of their bombed-out rehearsal space, their hopes and dreams as fragmented as the basement they practised in for over six years.
Acrassicauda, in many ways, might represent the hopes of an entire generation of young Iraqis: people who want the freedom to live without fear of imminent death, to be free from persecution for their beliefs or lifestyle or even their choice of music; and who wish, most of all, for peace and safety in their stricken land. It was a bit of a wake-up call, walking out of the cinema screening onto the packed, partying streets of Austin, where hundreds of bands have the freedom to play their music without fear. There are others who are not so lucky.
