Filmmaker Q&A: Andrew Himes

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Director, Voices in Wartime

While researching the article "The Docs of War" (January/February 2006), I watched at least a dozen documentaries about Iraq. One that truly stands out is Voices in Wartime, a film about the role of poets and poetry during times of conflict. In the end, the film didn't quite fit with the focus of my article, which was more about docs looking at the experiences on the ground, both for the Iraqi civilians and the occupying soldiers. But I didn't want to let this excellent interview with Andrew Himes, director of Voices in Wartime, go to waste. Herewith. -- LU

Leif Utne: What inspired you to make Voices in Wartime in the first place? Why the focus on poetry?

Andrew Himes: In February of 2003, I helped to found the Poets Against The War <www.poetsagainstthewar.org> movement, which brought together over 13,000 poets from around the world within just a few weeks to publish their poetry in public opposition to the launching of the war in Iraq. We had over 600 poetry readings against the war in over twenty different countries, and I put up the invitation on our website asking people to send us digital video footage of their poetry readings. To my amazement I got a huge number of videotapes from all over the world, and my first thought was to produce a short film documenting this extraordinary outcry of poetry against war. As I got into it however, I began to think about producing a documentary that used poetry as a way to examine the emotional trauma and the terrible experience of war itself around the world and all through history.

I grew up in a preacher's family, a fundamentalist family, deeply conservative, in the Deep South. In fact, most of my male relatives, going back seven generations, have been Baptist preachers, and my granddad was one of the founders of the modern fundamentalist movement back in the nineteen thirties. By contrast, I grew up in the midst of the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement of the nineteen sixties, and with a deep opposition to the politics of my family and of my community. So it's been hard for us to talk about the most important things in the world without just arguing, despite the fact that my family is a set of wonderful people with great values who love poetry, as I do. I wanted to make a film that would allow me to have a different kind of conversation with my family, that is to connect with them, through poetry, through the language of story and personal, human experience, and talk about the most painful and difficult subject in the world -- war -- and the fear and terror and pain that give rise to war.

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