Sights

Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi in a scene from the documentary “Nice Bombs.”

In January of 2004, just as dawn was breaking, Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi bribed the guards on Iraq’s Jordanian border and drove back into the country he hadn’t seen in 24 years. He brought along his American-born wife, Kristie, and a video camera.

The resulting documentary, “Nice Bombs: My Journey Back to Iraq,” was the winner of the Chicago Underground Film Festival’s 2006 award for best documentary feature and the Tribeca All-Access Creative Promise Award for a documentary feature. It has since screened in New York City, Santa Fe and Milwaukee. It will premiere on the Sundance Channel Wednesday, March 19 at 6:30 p.m. EST. (Watch the trailer.)

Alshaibi was born in Baghdad in 1969. When he was 11 years old, his mother, fearing the escalating war with Iran, hid the family’s gold in his little brother’s diaper and slipped her four children over Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, telling the guards they were taking a short trip out of the country for medical reasons. The ruse worked and, after a few years of bouncing around various Arab countries, the family finally landed in Iowa City.

In 1991, Alshaibi had just turned 21 and was studying art at The University of Iowa when the first Gulf War broke out. He received a letter from the INS informing him that his residency had expired and he was to be deported back to Iraq. He also got another letter, this one from Baghdad, drafting him into the Iraqi army. He applied, successfully, for political asylum in the United States, and eventually became a naturalized citizen.

With the horror of war finally behind him, why go back? His own mother, after all, said she’d never forgive him if he returned.

“For so long there was this part of my past that was invisible,” Alshaibi explains, “and I missed it.”

But he also blames Studs Terkel.

In Chicago, Alshaibi was working as an archivist for Terkel at the Chicago History Museum and happened to mention that he’d thought about returning to Baghdad to interview his family. “You have to go!” Terkel insisted, and put up the initial financing for the project. Additional funding from the Playboy Foundation and the Creative Capital Foundation for the Arts transformed the idea into reality.

In the oral history tradition of his mentor, “Nice Bombs” presents a wide diversity of opinion, and it does so without the editorializing so common in other documentaries of the same genre. From coffee shops to kitchen tables, Alshaibi records the conversations of people whose voices were long suppressed under Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraqis love America. They hate America. They hate Saddam. They miss Saddam. Women are free. Women are oppressed. Things are getting better. Things are getting worse.

A 13-year-old boy proclaims his love for American soldiers and George W. Bush for ridding his country of Saddam Hussein. Under Saddam, “we were scared of everything, we were scared from the walls,” says one man.

One of Alshaibi’s cousins says the American soldiers are more ethical than the Iraqi Republican Guard, while another describes them holding a machine gun to his head and denounces them as “worse than Saddam.” A young man praises the Americans for giving the country much-needed security, but a neighbor woman faults them for failing to do just that. “Under Saddam there was peace,” she says. She could get a job and make money and her life revolved around her relationships with her family and her neighbors. Now all of that is gone.

But the comments are more than soundbites. Alshaibi is on a journey back to the country he was forced to flee as a child, and each encounter is weighted by memory. Shots of a rickety old slide he used to play on as a child, now shoved in a garage to rust, or a framed photograph of his mother in her graduation gown, clutching her diploma — these sort of details are what keep “Nice Bombs” from being the random collection of man-on-the-street anecdotes we’re so used to seeing.

In a war where civilian deaths are referred to as “collateral damage” and their numbers rounded up or rounded down for political purposes, Alshaibi introduces us to a cross-section of Iraqis, gives them names and, most importantly, histories and context. This is not just a country scarred by war, he seems to be saying; it’s a collection of individuals with aspirations thwarted.

In one of the film’s most interesting exchanges, Alshaibi asks an acquaintance if, as a woman, she had more freedom when she was living in Sweden than she does in Iraq. Yes, she says, of course. But as she elaborates on her fear of going out alone, it’s clear that sexism isn’t at the forefront of her concerns — in fact, we wonder if she misunderstood the question. She can’t get her papers processed in Baghdad, she complains. She fears taking a bus across town because the war-torn city is in chaos.

It’s a different definition of “freedom” than the version Laura Bush was peddling at the beginning of the war, the version that imagines Iraqi women tearing off their veils and waving them in the streets.

If anything, Alshaibi’s film gives us a glimpse at how small a role national policy plays in the lives of Iraqi women. In Afghanistan, misogyny was a matter of law, embedded into whatever civil code could be said to exist in a society so desperately characterized by poverty and tribal warfare. But Iraq had always been one of the most secular countries in the Middle East, and one with some of the most liberal laws concerning women’s rights. Where sexism does exist, it was usually — as in America — experienced most strongly at the personal level, in one’s home or workplace.

But she says it’s true, her life would be easier if she veiled. “So wear a hijab and go around wherever you want,” her husband counters. “What’s your problem? Society gives you the freedom, if you wear a scarf.”

Easy for him to say, you want to reply, but it’s also interesting to note that this man is not advocating the veil from a religious point of view and has no particular opinion on his wife’s decision to abandon it. To him, the hijab is just a matter of pragmatism, one of the many ways Iraqis adapt to living under chaos and surveillance.

What makes him most angry is the way Iraqis are presented abroad. “How many men do you know that have two wives?” he asks, rhetorically, of another man at the table. He turns directly to Alshaibi’s camera: “This is a very key issue.”

Islam gives men the right to have up to four wives, a policy that made sense in seventh-century Arabia when scores of men were felled in warfare and left their widows and children without a means of support. In the cosmopolitan cities of the modern Middle East, however, it’s usually considered an arcane and backward practice, and men and women alike are irritated at being continually associated with it, as though polygamy is a significant part of their daily reality.

The portrayal of Islamic justifications is conspicuous in its absence, and to that end it’s probably the most compelling aspect of the film. Alshaibi, the son of a Sunni mother and a Shi’a father, has no particular loyalties to either side of that conflict; to him, the broader question is religion vs. secularism.

In an interview with Salam Pax, the Iraqi blogger who became an international sensation for recording his first-hand impressions during the beginning of the war, Alshaibi asks why, in the aftermath of Saddam’s downfall, Iraqis didn’t respond with an avalanche of artistic expression and political critique. “Instead it was just ” Islam.”

“If you put up a picture of Saddam Hussein, you can take it down,” Pax replied. “But if you put up a picture of Ali or Hussein, you can’t take it down, or you’ll be labeled a heretic.”

Alshaibi never reveals his own feelings about the American invasion, but by the end of the film, when he interviews two American soldiers (quote: “Freedom’s new to them — they don’t know how to deal with it”), it’s clear how offensively simplistic and xenophobic even the most optimistic justifications for this war are. Freedom’s new to “them”? You mean Tareef, Dina, Hameed, Alshaibi’s cousins and neighbors?

It’s a return to the American rhetoric with which we’re so familiar, but in context the sentiment is jarring — embarrassingly crude. Seeing this 20-something soldier position himself as a representative of democracy and Enlightenment values might suffice for a quick interview on CNN, but after spending 90 minutes with Iraqis whose understanding of the political situation is far more nuanced, the whole exchange just makes you wince.

In the film’s closing scene, Alshaibi, now back in Chicago, calls Tareef — the cousin who acted as his tour guide around Baghdad and the one Alshaibi says his own life might have mirrored had he not left Iraq as a child. He asks him if the situation has gotten any better. No, Tareef says, it’s gotten worse. Much worse.

Alshaibi’s trip, undertaken with much trepidation a year into the war, seems, retroactively, almost quaint: January 2004 was a kinder, gentler time in Iraq’s history. Now, Tareef says, there is no way Alshaibi and his wife could return to Baghdad without being killed or kidnapped.

The same spirited, easy-going, jaded-but-jocular cousin who only a year earlier was willing to risk driving to the border of the Green Line, the one who jokingly described Iraqis as sheep, Americans as wolves, and himself as a “hyena,” now speaks with a sense of purpose so serious it leaves a lump in your throat.

“We need a miracle,” he tells his American cousin.