Filmmaker Q&A: Aaron Raskin

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Producer, The Dreams of Sparrows

In preparation for the article "The Docs of War" (January/February 2006), I interviewed several filmmakers about their experiences making documentaries about the Iraq war. Aaron Raskin, the American producer of The Dreams of Sparrows, the first doc made by an Iraqi crew to come out of the country since the U.S. invasion, emailed me his answers to a few questions via a hijacked wireless signal from a rooftop in Mexico, where he is working on his next co-production with Dreams' Iraqi director Hayder Mousa Daffar. -- LU

Leif Utne: Since The Dreams of Sparrows came out last March, what kind of response have you had?

Aaron Raskin: It is interesting, when we first started screening the film people didn't...get it. Industry people still don't get it, but the audiences increasingly understand the nuance presented. Perhaps American media had reached such a polarized state circa 2002-3 and now that trend is retreating.

As I said, the response has been improving, though our audience response has always been very strong. The world premiere was at SXSW and usually several people left crying, hugging Hayder, asking how they could help. The industry was initially incredibly...hostile...to the release of this film. Currently the trend in

Documentary filmmaking is to make doc's that are like narratives. Doc filmmakers practically storyboard their docs these days. I was raised on such verite docs as "Man with a Movie Camera", which I don't think most acquisitions execs have ever heard of. I'd rather make an art film than a blockbuster and that's what we ended up doing, at least in the eyes of the industry - it is a movie that presents a total story that doesn't translate from any of its parts. It is uniquely Iraqi in that it reads like a metaphor.

Newsweek and several other mags loved the story of Hayder and his crew, particularly once Hayder took a tour of America and met them in person. But most reviewers, such as the Village Voice, simply told us that they wouldn't consider a review until we had a theatrical run. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen, because most of the digital theaters in NYC we approached wouldn't run the film once the DVD had been released, a move we did to be ahead of the tide of "other" films from Iraq. Mistake? Sure. But at the time, other Iraq docs had come out and done terribly in theaters, making the lukewarm reception of ours turn cold. I didn't see any other option than to go straight to DVD and hope we would get enough press to finance a future, better project with the iraqeye group.

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