[Imc-houston-announce] TONIGHT! HIMC screening of WAR FEELS LIKE WAR

[tish]

Houston Indymedia and POV present a screening of:

WAR FEELS LIKE WAR
Directed by Esteban Uyarra

Saturday,  July 24, 7:30 pm at Rice Cinema

The Iraq War introduced the concept of the "embedded" reporter to the 
world. Their highly choreographed, round-the-clock reporting gave the 
Pentagon extraordinary control of war reports back home, and also 
allowed the military to quietly contain those journalists who wanted to 
report the war independently: the so-called "unilaterals."

"War Feels Like War" is the story of an international group of 
journalists who refused to be "embedded." Motivated by the desire to 
get the 'real' story, the unilaterals ventured onto the battlefield 
without military protection and frequently without guides. They often 
found themselves reporting the stories that went uncovered in the wake 
of the triumphal columns of soldiers and embeds: civilian deaths, 
injuries, chaos in the streets, and a more mixed reception for the 
invaders than appeared in first reports.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was one of the largest media events in 
history. More than 3,000 journalists from around the world flocked to 
Kuwait City and Baghdad to cover the war (19 died, at least five from 
"friendly fire"). Many, including representatives from all the major 
Western news organizations that dominated coverage of the war, were 
prepared to follow the troops from Kuwait as embeds, or to file reports 
from the relative safety of hotel lobbies.

To make "War Feels Like War," Uyarra spent three months with a 
hand-held camera following a diverse group of international 
unilaterals, sharing their dangers and uncertainties as they maneuvered 
to get into the war zone and then to Baghdad. These reporters were not 
from marginal, alternative news outlets, but included correspondents 
from major U.S. newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, and 
representatives of leading broadcasters in America (including 
best-selling author and foreign correspondent P.J. O'Rourke reporting 
for ABC Radio News), Norway, Denmark, Poland and Spain.

Along the way, "War Feels Like War" gives riveting vérité portraits of 
the journalists themselves, whose conflicting feelings of attraction 
and repulsion to combat mirror the ambivalence of their audiences over 
modern-day "war as spectacle." The journalists are alternately cynical 
about human motives and seduced by the romanticism of being war 
correspondents. Thoughts of self-importance are punctured by the grim 
realities of war. Their daring is in constant tension with the impulse 
for self-preservation.

"This is the story of journalists caught up in a new era in 
war-reporting," says director and cameraman Esteban Uyarra, "and of a 
media world now divided in two camps — 'embeds' and 'unilaterals' — and 
what that means for how we see and feel about war."

for more information see: 
http://houston.indymedia.org/features/Film_Series/

Rice Cinema is located on the Rice University Campus in the Rice Media 
Center
Entrance #8 University and Stockton Dr

Fiscal Sponsorship for HIMC provided by the SouthWest Alternate Media 
Project
www.swamp.org

POV is a program on PBS
pbs.org/pov
check out their informative website about this film and watch the 
trailer:
pbs.org/pov/warfeelslikewar

DONT HATE THE MEDIA BE THE MEDIA!
houston.indymedia.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 3321 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-houston-announce/attachments/20040724/ce20c88c/attachment.bin