POLEMIC WITH A TOUCH OF ROCK’N’ROLL
by Kim Sengupta
Independent Media Weekly
March 19, 2007
First Edition
Documentary is now a winning genre – among a section of the viewing
public. ‘Screamers’ is a powerful attempt to reach a new audience.
A heavy metal band in full flow. Flashing strobe lights and smoke from
dry ice. Bouncers trying to hold back head-banging fans from the stage.
The scenes are much like any other from rock concerts. But what is
different here is that the lyrics being belted out by System of
a Down and chanted by their fans is about the Armenian massacre,
Rwanda and Darfur and part of highly polemical film about genocide.
Screamers is the latest in a recent line of feature-length
documentaries on hard, gritty subjects to be released in the cinema.
Others have included Stephen Spielberg’s Munich, Spike Lee’s When the
Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts about Katrina and, of course,
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
Most people who have been to see these films are, one can assume,
already interested in the subject matters. Screamers, however, is the
first to use a popular band in an effort to reach a younger generation
which may not be aware of historic and present-day injustices.
The crowds who turn up for the concerts are given pamphlets by Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch and the band bellow out their
thoughts during the performance.
And it appears to be working. Fans questioned as they leave the
gigs show a surprising level of knowledge about what is going on
in places such as Darfur and the issues are also discussed in their
various websites.
Screamers has been co-produced by the BBC and will be shown in the
Storyville series on 28 March. It has also done the rounds of various
film festivals and received the Audience Award at the American Film
Institute festival last November. The director and producer, Carla
Garapedian and Peter McAlevey, are both former journalists and say
they took a reporter’s approach to gathering backing for the project.
Garapedian, who holds American and British dual nationalities,
had worked as a BBC news-reader before going on to make acclaimed
documentaries such as Zarmina: Lifting the Veil, about the plight of
women in Afghanistan, Children of the Secret State, charting acute
deprivation in North Korea and My Friend the Mercenary, examining the
attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea to which Mark Thatcher was linked.
McAlevey, an American, was formerly a reporter with Newsweek. He had
been involved in the production of films including Flatliners and Radio
Flyer. The idea for Screamers came about when a project McAlevey and
Garapedian were working on – a comedy about her time at the Beeb –
fell through.
Garapedian, of Armenian origin, who has been campaigning to gain
international recognition that the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in
Turkey was genocide, had heard about System of a Down, whose members
are also Armenian and involved in the same cause. Like Garapedian,
they also wanted to make a stand against the inhumanity which is
taking place now in various parts of the world with the West turning
a blind eye. They are also hugely successful in their niche market,
with sales of 16 million CDs so far.
"It was proving impossible to approach them," recalled McAlevey. "You
get this very often, of course, with acts which are doing well. The
people around them want to stick with the winning formulae, they
do not want to get involved with something new, experimental, which
might fail.
"Then I found out the address of Rick Rubin, the guy who looks after
them, and my journalist’s training kicked in. We wrote a very short,
three-paragraph proposal and I just threw it over the wall of his
home. We got a call back the next day from his PA. We thought this
would be something that works. Don’t forget, Spike Lee said that he
got more satisfaction from his Katrina film than all his feature films
because the sheer scale of the feedback that he got was so much more
than from all the others."
It was, however, several months before Garapedian and McAlevey met
Serj Tankian, the singer. The most political of the band members –
he is moving to New Zealand because he does not want his taxes in the
US being spent on invading countries – was immediately enthusiastic.
"I had been with a group of human rights activists outside one of
their concerts in the past handing out leaflets and I was amazed
by the interest shown by them, not just about Armenia but what was
happening in places like Darfur and Iraq, so System were the ideal
people to work with.
"This is a golden age for documentaries, perhaps the second one we
have had since the 1950s, when there were people who had been shooting
the Second Word War bringing their craft and experience in producing
hard-edged stuff. Now there is a demand from the public for hard,
strong, in-depth documentaries because they are concerned about what
is going on around the world.
"I didn’t want to make a so-called ‘balanced’ documentary. I don’t
believe you can actually have two sides to genocide – either you
accept it or you deny it, and the danger lies in the denial."
Tankian says it was only natural that the band should take part in
the film. "I have always had a problem with injustice, whether it’s
personal, national or international. It’s just always bothered me to
the point where I have to do or say something."
It was perhaps not surprising that the film was commissioned by
Storyville, which has built up a reputation for adventurous and
innovative programming.
Nick Fraser, the series editor, said, "What I liked about it was that
it was attempting to reach a younger audience in an imaginative way.
I didn’t know much about the band, but there’s someone working for me
who did. It’s an angry film, but it has been made extremely well. I
think that people like us should encourage this kind of film-making,
because the topics they are addressing are immensely important."
‘Screamers’ is on BBC4 on 28 March