Screening Times: Apr 29th, 7:30pm (AMC Village VII), Apr 30, 10:30pm (Village East), May 1st, 3:00pm (AMC Village VII), May 2nd, 11:30am (19th St AMC), May 3rd, 10:45am (Village East)
A provocative look at the daily lives of four Iraqi teenagers struggling to educate themselves and simply survive their senior years of high school, journalists turned filmmakers Ivan O'Mahoney and Laura Winter's
Baghdad High surfaces this week a Tribeca with a tremendous amount of anticipation. Shot largely by the cast themselves, its a penetrating look at the delicate balance these students make between the concerns any teenager faces with those of a much more deadly nature.
Filmmaker: Tell us about your backgrounds as filmmakers. You both began as journalists, yes?
O'Mahoney: My original background is international law. After law school I worked as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia and then as a litigation lawyer for a few years. I loved the investigative angle of the work, but being in a big city firm was often frustrated feeling I was representing the party on the wrong side of the argument. I switched into journalism ten years ago. While at journalism school (Columbia/NYC) I immediately took to the camera. My wild ideas of becoming an on screen war reporter quickly evaporated - early on I realized I wanted to make films and rather be behind the camera. It started with very journalistic magazine length stories. Over the years the films have become proper documentaries, longer, much more observational and character driven.
But even as a documentary film maker I still am drawn to stories like Baghdad High that have a high journalistic value to them.
Filmmaker: How did the two of you begin working together on this project?
O'Mahoney: Laura and I met through the alumni network of our journalism school. Two years ago I started my own production company in London and put out a call for ideas among the school's alumni. I was looking for long term access based story ideas. Ideas that would make for great epic narratives with lots of time passage in them - stories that would take viewers on a true journey.
Laura had just moved to London. She responded and said she wanted to make a film about Iraq. Both Laura and I had worked there previously. Laura's idea was to make a film about Iraqi teenagers - cut through the spin of officialdom so to speak and go straight to Iraq's future, i.e its teens. The best place to find them was a high school...
Filmmaker: What are some of the fundamental challenges in making a doc in which the participants are doing most of the filming?
O'Mahoney: As a director, even in observational documentary where you have to allow for a lot of unknows and surprises, you have a lot of control over the gathering of your material, your film's building blocks. A lot of that control was lost by default since the kids were deciding what to film and when to film it. It did provide for a lot of excitement back in London every time we watched a tape and an unexpected gem emerged.
By constantly viewing tapes as they came in, we were able to help the kids shape their stories, encourage them to follow up on certain story lines and help fill in gaps if we spotted them. One of the biggest challenges was to make sure that at the end of the school year there would be enough good material and enough stories with beginning, middle, and ends to sustain a long form documentary. And then there was the small issue of editing 300 hours of raw material, all in Arabic, into a watch-able film!
Filmmaker: What process did you undertake to choose compelling students to be in the film?
O'Mahoney: Given the security concerns for all involved it was largely up to the headmaster who did an extraordinary job. Casting decisions were largely based on whether there was a relationship of trust between him and the parents. We cast the net fairly wide originally starting with 8 students.
Over the first two months or so it became clear that the boys who ended up as our key characters were the strongest candidates. Other boys also dropped out because parents fled Baghdad too early in the production.
Filmmaker: Did you encounter any aggression or threats of violence during production?
O'Mahoney: Surprisingly little. It helped that the boys were allowed to only film at home, in secure environments like family houses and at school. We tried to keep it all as low profile as possible. There have been a few tricky wrinkles which required some diplomatic ironing by our local producers.
Filmmaker: What were the biggest difficulties while constructing the film in post-production and how did you manage them?
O'Mahoney: The biggest challenges in the edit were how to construct the general narrative flow and how to interweave the stories of the boys. There obviously was the chronological narrative of the school year and some clear time markers like the first day of school, Saddam's execution, Christmas and final exams, but what about the personal stories? Ultimately, it became clear that one of the boys had documented the greatest number of personal issues and challenges in his life. After several structural approaches we decided to first edit this boy's narrative, almost as if we were making a film just about him. When that was done, it became clear what was still needed to give a fuller picture of Iraq and the complexities relating to ethnic/religious backgrounds of the characters. The stories of the other boys all of sudden fell into place.
Filmmaker: If you we're to make the film again, what, if anything, would you do differently?
O'Mahoney: I wouldn't have tried to edit the film in stages which we did to try and stay on top of the vast amounts of material coming in. While we had several editing bursts throughout the year, we never really knew where any of the stories were ultimately heading as each individual narrative was still developing in Baghdad. It wasn't until we got close to the end of the school year that we could say 'this is a solid storyline that we can follow from A to B to C. Lets include it.' The film went through so many incarnations - the early cuts are completely unrecognizable compared to the final film.
Perhaps a lot of that was inevitable given the nature of the project.
Filmmaker: What's next for you?
O'Mahoney: I have moved from London to Sydney, Australia, with my family recently and am trying to re-establish my small independent production company called StoryLab there. I am looking for the next 'big' story and my next feature length documentary. In the meantime I am also developing shorter television films, more specifically a series about Australian conspiracy stories.
Conspiracy stories, along with playing the Ukelele, are my guilty pleasure.
# posted by Brandon Harris @ 4/25/2008 08:36:00 PM
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