Iraq is front and centre in many films in recent years, none
more so than this harrowing new work by documentarian Nick
Broomfield. The film is a highly realistic, vérité-like fictional
rendering of an incident that took place in the village of Haditha,
a hotbed in the middle of the Sunni Triangle where much of the
insurgency has taken place. In November 2005, a roadside IED
(Improvised Explosive Device) killed one US Marine and wounded
two others. Enraged fellow Marines exacted revenge by killing
twenty-four Iraqis: men, women and children. Four Marines were
subsequently charged with murder.
In Battle for Haditha, Broomfield sets out to recreate the incident,
imagining the circumstances that provoked the violence and led
to the massacre. Two realities, two cultures, two groups of men
slowly intersect. The film starts innocuously enough, when we
are introduced to American soldiers, streaking across the desert
in their armoured Humvees. They drop into a local store to check
out DVDs (!) and find themselves talking to a young male clerk
whose fate is soon to be entwined with their own. Broomfield then
switches his focus to the Iraqi reality, as two men pile into the
back of a pickup truck for a quick lesson in the primitive mechanics
of the IED. He meticulously details the daily routines of the two
sides, foreign and local, juxtaposing the monotony of patrols
with the waiting game played by the bombers. What we see is
not a simple black-and-white reality. Ordinary people in
extraordinary situations do violent and unexpected things.
Broomfield walks a tightrope, somehow managing to step
back from the emotions of the event to find compassion
and humanity – and their opposites – on both sides. At the
same time, he shows the mind-numbing, brutal results of the
violence that is unleashed. The film grimly renders the harsh
realities of this quagmire where innocent civilians, simply trying
to get by, are caught in the crossfire, victims of Americans who
kick down their doors, and Iraqis who do the same thing.
Broomfield forces us to follow him down this road through the
sheer power of his imagery. We are spellbound: this is what it
must be like to be there.
Piers Handling,
Toronto Film Festival Programme
