Please join us Thursday, April 17th for a screening of 500 Miles to Babylon, a compelling film about Iraq under U.S. occupation. Filmmaker David Martinez will be on hand to discuss his experiences in Iraq. Sarah Husain, a representative of the War Resisters League’s Youth and Counter Militarism Project will discuss counter-recruitment campaign efforts in New York City.
ABOUT THE FILM:
500 Miles to Babylon is a one-hour documentary shot in multiple cities in Iraq in 2003-4. Narrated by the filmmaker, using footage shot in Iraq threaded with graphically animated archival sequences to provide historic context, the film addresses the current war not simply as a conflict over petroleum profits or a scheme to fill a company’s coffers, but as part of a larger American imperial project.
Through impromptu interviews, glimpses of daily life, still photographs, and footage of car-bombs, demonstrations, night-time graffiti artists, Sufi rituals, and the celebrations following Saddam’s capture, 500 Miles To Babylon reveals the complex situation in contemporary Iraq through a personal lens. Far from being a simple anti-war movie, 500 Miles illustrates the terrible complexity of a people brutalized by a dictatorship, and the catastrophic results when that system is changed overnight by shortsighted military means.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is a Los Angeles based artists collective whose magazine sits at the discursive juncture of fine art, media theory and anti-authoritarian activism. Please join co-founder and collective member Marc Herbst for a presentation and theoretical retrospective of the past seven years of the project’s life.
