Ryan Chartrand“Suppose Iraq invaded America. An Iraqi soldier was on a tank passing through an American street, waving his gun at people, threatening them, raiding and trashing houses. Would you accept that?” asks an Iraqi imam in Steve Connors and Molly Bingham’s unprecedented documentary, “Meeting Resistance.” The controversial film will be showing at 7 p.m. tonight at the San Luis Obispo City/County Library.
Connors said that, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a non-partisan research group that studies the press, just over 2 percent of news stories with one dominant source are Iraqi insurgents. This film changes that.
“Most Americans aren’t going to go to Iraq and (interview) Iraqis attacking American troops, so we did that for them,” Bingham said.
Connors and Bingham were freelance photojournalists in Baghdad after Sept. 11, 2001 when the country fell to U.S. occupation in April 2003. While working for various newspapers and magazines, the two became curious as to who was behind the insurgencies aimed at U.S. soldiers.
During a six-week hiatus in which they were tracking progression in Iraq, the tandem agreed the Iraqi insurgency was an aspect of the war that was not being sufficiently publicized. They returned to Baghdad in August 2003 and began their 10-month project in the neighborhood of Adhamiya to produce “Meeting Resistance.”
Prior to the project, Bingham, a Harvard graduate, began her photojournalism career covering the genocide in Rwanda from 1994 to 1998. She then worked on two special projects for Human Rights Watch in Burandi and Central Africa. She was appointed as Official Photographer to the office of the vice president of the United States from 1998 through 2001. On Sept. 11, 2001, she took some of the only close-up photographs of the Pentagon. She then moved her work to the Middle East in 2002 and spent time in Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip and Iran before making her way to Iraq prior to U.S. occupation in 2003.
Connors, born in England, was a British soldier for nine years in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. During his service, as his own teacher, he began to photograph the conflicts he fought in. He worked as a photojournalist for London newspapers after leaving the military and later began to look elsewhere. While serving for highly regarded world newspapers – such as The New York Times, The Guardian in London and Paris Match in France – he covered the fall of the communist government in Czechoslovakia, the fall of Yugoslavia and the war that ensued thereafter, and the economic strife in Russia and the former Soviet Union. After spending 15 months in Afghanistan beginning in November 2001, he stationed himself in Iraq for 14 months, 10 of which were spent working on “Meeting Resistance.”
The film is 84 minutes in length and the directors will stay for a question-and-answer forum after the screening.
A translator essential to the project assisted the directors in interviewing 45 active members of the Iraqi insurgent movement. Twelve of these people were interviewed extensively, sometimes for four or five hours, and six of the 12 participants were interviewed multiple times. Eight insurgents actively involved in fighting are chronicled in “Meeting Resistance,” along with a political science professor and the aforementioned imam from the mosque.
All participants in the film are given simplistic titles like “The Teacher” and “The Wife” while their identities are blurred or obscured to maintain anonymity. “Most of them had the cautious nature – the physical and emotional bearing – of people who knew what they were doing was dangerous to them and could get them killed,” Bingham writes of the characters on the film’s Web site.
Through these interviews, Bingham and Connors said they learned about Islamic practices and beliefs, who exactly is behind the resistance movement and why such a movement is happening.
“We don’t want to tell people what to think, but the film gives people a lot to think about,” Bingham said. She added that the film doesn’t preach, but she assured that it was well-researched and well-reported.
“Meeting Resistance” exposes several myths that mainstream U.S. media has led American citizens to believe, Connors said. He added that the most prominent false belief many have is the U.S. military is stationed in Iraq in order to stop the factions in Iraq from killing each other. He explained that 74 percent of significant violence in Iraq is directed at the U.S. by insurgents – a startling statistic that shatters the misconception that the majority of violence in Iraq is genocidal. Connors and Bingham state affirmatively that a main cause of violence in the country is the fact that it’s occupied by an outsider.
A second myth is the insurgents are extremists and members of al-Qaida. In a trailer for the film, a man says, “The insurgency is mainly composed of ordinary Iraqis, not al-Qaida operatives or former regime members.” He then lists those involved: engineers, officers, teachers, normal cultured people. He stresses that the insurgents are commited Muslims who share one common belief – a nationalistic opposition to Iraq’s occupation and an extreme sense of honor.
Bingham called the film a “contemporary study on the human condition of occupation.”
Connors added that people must remember the Iraqis have been governing themselves for 7,000 years. “I think they can manage themselves,” he said.
Bingham added, “Don’t forget the Iraqis are the descendents of the people who wrote the first legal codes in human history.”
Connors explained there have been disputes in the U.S. Army over strategy.
“Some think bombing cities in Iraq is the way to win the war,” he said, while Bingham mentioned the U.S. is “violently trying to make a country peaceful, which is sort of an oxymoron.”
After the film was presented at the Al-Jazeera Film Festival in April 2006, Colonel Jeff Ragland, the leader of the U.S. Army’s Red Team, a sanction of the military that studies the opposition and introduces alternative strategies, asked the two directors to show “Meeting Resistance” to troops in Baghdad and other military stations. Ragland believed the film explained why the insurgent violence was occuring better than he could himself.
On the film’s Web site, Bingham writes, “more than a few times we have been approached by individuals who work in Iraq, speak Arabic, speak and listen to Iraqis every day – they tell us that the film is still a very accurate portrayal of what they encounter.” (Although Connors and Bingham filmed in 2003-2004, they say their story is still relevant to the insurgent movement.) One military member said recently, “This is the most accurate depiction I’ve seen anywhere of what is happening in Iraq.”
“Meeting Resistance” was first screened in a preview showing in London in August 2007. Since then, the directors have screened their film in locations all over America and have shown it at numerous film festivals, where it has been named an official selection or the winner on many occasions.
Bingham said each individual brings their own preconceptions about the Iraq conflict with them before they view the film but stated that people “will come away from it with an understanding of who is fighting the Americans and why.” From there, she said, “those who watch the film can decide what the consequences of that knowledge should be.”
Joe Garofoli, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in a recent review, “‘Meeting Resistance’ should be required viewing for anyone who thinks pouring more troops into Iraq will stamp down the insurgency – or the spirit that ignited it.”
A donation of $12 is suggested at the showing.