Battle For Haditha

Battle For Haditha

Sunday 3 February 2008 00.12 GMT First published on Sunday 3 February 2008 00.12 GMT

Battle For Haditha (93 mins, 15)
Directed by Nick Broomfield; starring Elliot Ruiz, Eric Mehalacopoulos, Andrew McLaren, Yasmine Hanani

There was a time in the 1930s when documentary film-makers considered themselves servants of purity and truth, and looked down on fiction films. There was a certain hypocrisy in their position, as documentaries then were infinitely more contrived than they are today. But Michael Balcon brought Ealing Studios from mediocrity to greatness during the Second World War when he invited people from the documentary movement like Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti to collaborate on feature movies. At the moment, both artistically and in terms of political and intellectual influence, the documentary seems in the ascendant.

Eventually, however, most documentarists are tempted to try their hand at features, in some cases only briefly: Michael Moore rapidly returned to his true métier after the dire Canadian Bacon. Nick Broomfield. one of our most provocative documentary directors, seemed to have made a similar retreat after his misguided venture with Diamond Skulls 20 years ago. But now, with much greater success, he's made two slightly fictionalised documentaries, both powerful in impact and exemplary in the handling of the facts. The first was Ghosts (2006), an account of a Chinese immigrant in Britain that reaches a climax with the cockle-pickers drowning in Morecambe Bay. The second is Battle For Haditha, a reconstruction of two days in November 2005 when American Marines took a terrible revenge on the civilian population of an Iraqi town after the death of a comrade in a roadside bomb incident. In all, they killed 24 men, women and children.

Broomfield's picture begins with some Marines from different ethnic backgrounds talking to camera about the bitter experience of the war in Iraq. All are genuine veterans no longer with the Marine Corps, playing people much like themselves and improvising a deal of the dialogue. We next see them crossing the desert in two Humvees, larking around in high spirits. Behind them, two camels are silhouetted on the horizon. A beautiful, potent image. Next, these men are on patrol in Haditha, once, so we're told, a favourite place for honeymooners, now 'the city of death', contested by insurgents and the American army.

The film then interweaves three narrative threads that will at the climax combine in a horrible noose. First, there are the young Marines, edgy, tired, full of macho pride in the corps but with little sense of purpose and no understanding of the people they came to liberate but now regard as their enemies. One is reminded of Broomfield's Bafta-winning documentary Soldier Girls (1981) about the training of female recruits in the US army at a time when military morale was being restored following the debacle of Vietnam. The sight of the girls being marched around the barracks chanting: 'I want to go to Iran, I want to kill an Iranian' gave the impression that little had been learnt.

In the second strand, the two bombers go about their business. One is a young man working in a store selling bootleg DVDs and second-hand electronic equipment, the other a middle-aged family man, thrown out of the Iraqi army by the invaders after 20 years of service and with no compensation. They pick up a bomb from al-Qaeda men, crazed fanatics who the previous week murdered 29 cops and have given alcohol vendors three days to desist or die. The pair are paid $500 on taking the bomb, with another $500 to come on completing their mission.

In the third strand, both detailed and extremely moving, we're introduced to the people living near the scene of the proposed crime. Innocents trapped between terrorists and the American army, they're faced with certain death if they help either side and likely death if they assist neither.

Shot largely with a hand-held camera by Mark Wolf (a veteran wildlife cameraman who worked with Broomfield on Ghosts), the film immerses us as no other film on Iraq has done in the dust and smoke of warfare and in the terror shared by civilians and soldiers alike as they're involved in horrific carnage. Everywhere, there is a failure or betrayal of leadership by demented mullahs, buck-passing senior officers, shameless politicians (the movie includes newsreel footage of Bush reacting to news of the massacre). All invite our contempt and our hearts go out to their victims, though not in exactly equal measure. At the end, both sides claim to have won. The American soldiers pray together at the scene of the crime, mourning the death of 'a young warrior' and thanking God for their victory over cowards. Meanwhile, a smug sheikh who has helped instigate the incident praises the civilians caught in the crossfire as martyrs and claims that the city had been repossessed. After seeing this movie, I found it difficult to listen calmly to Rudy Giuliani's claim in Florida last Wednesday that 'America will always be the land of the free because we are the home of the brave'.

Battle For Haditha was filmed in neighbouring Jordan, in and around Jerash where armies have clashed for thousands of years. It's the site of one of the most awesome Roman cities which for some years now American cultural institutions and US archaeologists have been working to restore.

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