Editor's Note: Incident in New Baghdad airs May 27 on The Documentary Channel. What follows is an interview we conducted with director James Spione in the weeks leading up to the Academy Awards.  

Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar® nomination. You can see Incident in New Baghdad at DocuDay LA on Saturday, February 25 at the Writers Guild of America Theater, with filmmaker James Spione in person.

Synopsis: In this raw, provocative documentary from independent filmmaker James Spione, one of the most notorious incidents of the Iraq War--the July 2007 slayings of two Reuters journalists and a number of other civilians by U.S. attack helicopters--is recounted in the powerful testimony of an American infantryman whose life was profoundly changed by his experiences on the scene.

U.S. Army Specialist Ethan McCord bore witness to the devastating carnage, found and rescued the two children caught in the crossfire, and soon turned against the war that he had enthusiastically joined only months before. Denied psychological treatment in Iraq for his PTSD, McCord returned home, struggling for years with anger, confusion, and guilt over the war. When WikiLeaks released the stunning cockpit video of the incident in April 2010, McCord was finally spurred into action, and began traveling the country, speaking out for the rights of PTSD sufferers and against the American wars in the Middle East.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

James Spione: Documentary work was something of a career change for me. I had directed a number of fiction shorts—Prelude, a Student Academy Award® winner, then Garden (Sundance ’95) and The Playroom. I also produced John G. Young’s first independent feature Parallel Sons. But in trying to get together my own feature to direct, I unfortunately got mired in years of development hell and was becoming increasingly frustrated with the whole process. So I started looking around for a project closer to home that I could just start myself, without the need for funding, stars, etc.

Just around that time I went to a family reunion up at my extended family’s homestead in central New York State, and there was much talk among my relatives about the future of our dairy farm there. My mother grew up on this farm, it had been in the family for five generations, but no one in the sixth generation wanted to carry on with it. After 150 years, that tradition was going to end. And that was the genesis of my first documentary, American Farm.

IDA: What inspired you to make Incident?

JS: It was the release by WikiLeaks of that stunning cockpit video recording of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Iraqi journalists and a number of other civilians, some armed, most unarmed. I believe this piece of video is one of the most significant historical documents to come out of the whole war, because the unedited version shows in real time just exactly how our modern wars work: the difficulty U.S. forces face in distinguishing the "enemy" from non-combatants, the extreme hazards faced by civilians in just walking down the street of their own city. And of course, the cruel, barbaric spectacle of the whole event, the relentless targeting and destruction of those trying to help the wounded, was just impossible to ignore. Never has the inhumanity of warfare been so completely unmasked.

But almost as disturbing to me was the treatment of this video by the U.S. mainstream mass media as just another political football to have the same tired, staged "debates" where talking heads spout predictable opinions. The TV coverage often seemed more about the video itself—was it wrong to release it? Who is this mysterious Julian Assange?—than the tragic event it depicted. So I turned to the web to try and find out more, and that’s where I found an online interview with Ethan McCord. Here was a soldier who said he was on the scene, who helped rescue two children caught in the crossfire, yet he was completely absent from our TV screens. Why? Because he had also turned vehemently against the war. And the vision of a soldier speaking out against the mission is simply not allowed into our mainstream discourse. So no matter what Mr. McCord had to say about witnessing this event, you would not be seeing him on CNN or ABC.

IDA: How did your vision change over the course of the filmmaking process?

JS: I have always envisioned making a feature-length doc that would look at this event as a sort of microcosm of war—how one act of violence ripples out through many lives, Iraqi and American, in so many destructive ways. Ethan’s was to be the first interview and I had begun contacting others in his battalion who were on the ground that day for background research. However, as I began to put together Ethan’s material I realized that his story is so compelling, the transformation of his character from gung–ho warrior to anti–war activist so complete, that it could stand on its own as a short film. And so I put together Incident in New Baghdad as a short about one man’s personal experience inside the insanity of war, and how that permanently changed him. I am hoping now that this short film has been recognized in such a visible way, that I will be able to get the support I need to complete the feature version.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making the film? How did you overcome them?

JS: The biggest challenges for me in making this film centered around the use of Ethan’s photographs of the war, particularly of the scene of this U.S. helicopter attack. As soon as I saw these images I realized that, as horrifying as that helicopter footage was, it paled in comparison to the nightmare on the ground. I knew I had to use some of these images, their depiction of the truth about war was just too important to ignore. Yet it weighed on me. I understood that these were not just bodies, every one of these people had families somewhere. So I undertook their use with a great sense of responsibility and used only those images I thought were absolutely necessary to make audiences aware of what had happened, and how Mr. McCord experienced it. Recently, the film has been criticized by some reviewers as somehow exploiting a tragedy. But I feel strongly that my job as a filmmaker, that every artist’s job really, is to look at the thing that most people do not want to see. And in this country, we do not like to look at the ugly truth of our wars.

This decision to make a film focusing on one man’s experience has also sparked quite a heated reaction among some Iraq War veterans, who seem to feel that the film is somehow misrepresenting what happened that day. I have explained many times that Incident in New Baghdad is not presenting a definitive account, and that I still intend to make a larger film with more perspectives. But a lot of this reaction goes back to well before the film was even begun—as soon as Ethan began speaking out publicly and challenging the wisdom and morality of our wars, he was vehemently attacked and ridiculed as a traitor. Some of this rage out there has even translated into physical threats against Ethan and his family. It is sad but not surprising really—when as a country we so often use violence as a means to an end, we should not be shocked when those we train to do so bring that attitude home.

IDA: As you’ve screened this film, how have audiences reacted? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reaction?

JS: Well for one thing, I certainly did not expect the film to quite strike the nerve that it did. It premiered at Tribeca and won the doc short category, which sort of blindsided me. I guess you work for so long in a kind of cocoon when you are editing something and can become quite removed from the effect your work is going to have on a first-time viewer.

I have also been very pleased at the discussions the film has started about a range of topics, not just about the war itself but also about how information is disseminated in America, about the issues of transparency and accountability, and especially about the psychic damage that many veterans carry home with them. The suicide rate among our Middle East war vets is alarmingly high—well beyond the casualty rate overseas. Yet there is no sense of national urgency about this—like the wars themselves, the suffering of our veterans remains invisible to most of us, a burden borne by a tiny percentage of the American population. The rest of us go shopping.

IDA: What docs or docmakers have served as inspirations for you?

JS: Well, of course there are the giants like the Maysles brothers and Frederick Wiseman, whose films have inspired thousands of documentarians. I recently saw Wiseman's Titicut Follies, which is still, after more than 40 years, a deeply disturbing experience in the way it takes you inside the hidden world of an asylum. The film asks a profound question without ever stating it explicitly: who is more insane, the inmates or the society that puts them away?

I love the layered complexity of Errol Morris’s work; I think The Fog of War is an absolutely masterful character study—and the fog in the title extends to the subject himself, who is constantly seeking to reinvent himself on camera in a fascinating and maddening way. Character is central to me in my own work, how people tell their stories, how they look at their lives, how they struggle for awareness and meaning. At bottom, Incident in New Baghdad is a film about empathy, about one intense and pivotal moment when a soldier picks up a bloodied child and asks himself, "Am I a killer, or am I a father?" And in that heartbeat, he must decide, and he decides to maintain his humanity. Exploring those moments of human crisis, the emotional dilemmas that we face where our split-second decisions tell us who we are—that to me is what documentary film is all about.

Incident in New Baghdad is screening at DocuDay LA at the Writers Guild of America Theater and at DocuDay NY at the Paley Center for Media as part of IDA's program of 2012 Oscar®-nominated films.

Learn more about Incident in New Baghdad at the film's website.

NBCUniversal Archives continues to support the documentary film community by becoming donors to the IDA at the Trustee level.

NBC News Archives is responsible for www.NBCUniversalArchives.com, an e-commerce platform that presents the archives of several NBCUniversal brands. Collections available for licensing include NBC News (with MSNBC and NBC local stations), NBC Sports, NBC Artworks (graphics), Universal Studios stock footage, Telemundo (Spanish language TV network), The Weather Channel, and NBC Radio. NBCUniversalArchives.com offers instant access to history, current events, weather, movies, animation, entertainment and sports.

With news of the day, from local to global, wars won and lost, statesmen and rock stars, landmark political events and cultural milestones, exclusive interviews with news-breakers, investigative reports and social commentary, NBC News Archives is a window to history as it unfolds.

You can stay connected with NBCUniversal Archives on Twitter and via email.

To make a donation to your favorite non-fiction non-profit, please contact IDA's Development Director at cindy@documentary.org or (213) 534-3600 x7400.

Back in October, we happily announced that the IDA had forged a new partnership with USC's School of Cinematic Arts through the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Education's American Film Showcase program. Now, just a month or so before the launch of the program, the official selections have been announced, which include 19 documentary features and four documentary shorts.

Of those selected, the IDA is happy to be affiliated with more than just a handful of these powerful and important films. Last year's Gasland and the critically-acclaimed Food, Inc. have both participated in past DocuDay events, and this year's DocuDay program features the coming-of-age documentary Undefeated. Both Library of Dust and To Be Heard were featured in the 2011 DocuWeeks program, with For Once in My Life and Spellbound participating in the program in years prior.

There are also some IDA Documentary Awards nominees in the bunch: Spellbound, Sweetgrass, Food, Inc. and Mad Hot Ballroom have all had the honor of being nominated in previous years.

In 2012, American Film Showcase will send American filmmakers and film experts overseas to present independent cinematic projects to a diverse audience. USC and IDA worked together to choose films that will promote insights into American life and culture while illustrating different viewpoints. We are happy to send Les Blank, Lisa Leeman, and other friends of the IDA overseas to act as ambassadors for this amazing program.

Visit the U.S. Department of State's website for more on the program and for a full list of all the films and experts chosen to participate.

As reported by al.com, documentary filmmakers Andrew Wight and Mike deGruy were killed this past weekend in Australia when a helicopter malfunctioned during take-off.

A excerpt from a Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival newsletter puts the measure of grief into better words than we can. Scroll to the bottom for ways to honor the memory of Mike deGruy.

We grow closer in times of shared sadness, and this week the international documentary film community grieves the devastating loss of two well-loved and deeply respected colleagues.

Andrew Wight, known to his friends as Wighty, and Mike deGruy were working on a film for James Cameron and National Geographic when they were killed this past weekend in Australia. Details about their helicopter crash are incomplete, but news reports suggest some kind of malfunction at take-off. Wighty and Mike were brilliant storytellers, remarkable colleagues, loving husbands & parents, fearless explorers and good friends who will be deeply missed.

Services for Andrew will be held near Melbourne. More details will be available in the next few days.

A celebration of Mike's life is planned for Sunday, February 12th in Santa Barbara. His website is the source for information. Please consider posting a thought, memory, poem, or other gesture there for Mike and his family.

If you would like to make a contribution in Mike's memory, please consider:

Santa Barbara Middle School
Heal the Oceans
Mobile Baykeepers

The Center for Social Media at American University is hosting Media That Matters 2012, a conference that brings together professionals, artists and students interested in making an impact through media.

This year's theme, "Change for Good," features conversations about how independent social change filmmakers can execute integrated campaigns that are strategic, action-oriented, and have enduring impact.

The conference begins on Friday, February 10, 2012 at 5pm with an opening keynote address from Meredith Blake, distinguished attorney, social entrepreneur, and Founder and CEO of Cause & Affect—a strategy consulting and management firm in the business of high-impact social change.

With workshops on Fair Use, a Designing for Impact clinic, short film screenings, advice on strategy for media creation, and various chances to network, who would want to miss such an event?

Sign up for Media the Matters today! Registration closes at 5:00pm EST on Wednesday, February 8.

The International Documentary Association is now accepting proposals for the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, which provides production support for full-length documentary films. The Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund is made possible by a grant from The New York Community Trust.

Named in honor of the landmark documentary filmmaker, the Fund provides annual grants totaling $75,000 to be used in the creation of original, independent documentary films that illuminate pressing issues in the United States. In 2012, grants will be made to up to 5 projects that tell a compelling story and focus on one of Pare Lorentz’s central concerns—the appropriate use of the natural environment, justice for all or the illumination of pressing social problems.

The Fund supports full-length documentary films that reflect the spirit and nature of Pare Lorentz’s work, exhibiting objective research, artful storytelling, strong visual style, high production values, artistic writing, outstanding music composition, as well as skillful direction, camerawork and editing. Complete guidelines and application are available at www.documentary.org/parelorentz.

Recipients of the 2011 Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund Grants:

• ¿Más Bebés?, Renee Tajima-Peña, Producer/Director
• As Goes Janesville, Brad Lichtenstein, Producer/Director
• Rise and Fall of ACORN: America's Most Controversial Anti-poverty Organization, Sam Pollard, Producer/Director
• American Village, Mary Posatko, Co-Director/Co-Producer, Emily Topper, Co-Director/Co-Producer

GE and CINELAN announced the FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Challenge and plan to award $200,000 in cash prizes to the top five entries in the professionally juried Challenge, with $100,000 going to the Grand Prize Winner. The Filmmaker Challenge is an expansion of the FOCUS FORWARD - Short Films, Big Ideas, a series of 30 three-minute nonfiction films developed by leading documentary filmmakers about the incredible human power of ideas and invention that will screen at prestigious film festivals globally, followed by day-and-date distribution online to millions of viewers. The initiative was first announced at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.

Qualifying films for the Filmmaker Challenge are three-minute end-to-end stories about people or organizations whose innovative efforts in medicine, computer science, robotics, engineering, green energy, or other fields of applied technical knowledge have had a significant positive impact on humanity. Recent, cutting-edge inventions that are changing how we live today are of special interest. The Challenge films will be available online to a global audience through Vimeo and will sit alongside the first 30 films produced by FOCUS FORWARD filmmakers. As the program progresses, FOCUS FORWARD films will be distributed across cable and satellite VOD, gaming system networks, Internet Free On Demand services as well as in theaters and on DVD. Submissions open in mid April, with winners to be announced at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. For more information, please visit www.focusforwardfilms.com/challenge.

The announcement was made this morning at a special press preview of the first five three-minute films in the FOCUS FORWARD - Short Films, Big Ideas initiative, which are also being presented the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The five films by Jessica Yu, Phil Cox, David W. Leitner, Jeremiah Zagar, and Jessica Edwards & Gary Hustwit will make their world premiere on Tuesday, January 24, at 12pm EST on www.vimeo.com/focusforwardfilms and at a special screening beginning 6pm MST at the Holiday Village 1 in Park City. The FOCUS FORWARD films will also be paired with select features in the U.S. Documentary Competition and World Cinema Documentary Competition sections at Sundance.

Also announced at the preview, the latest filmmakers to join the FOCUS FORWARD initiative are Steven Cantor (loudQUIETloud), Kief Davidson (Kassim the Dream), Senain Kheshgi (Project Kashmir), Victor Kossakovsky (¡Vivan las antipodas!),Jeff Reichert (Gerrymandering), and Annie Sundberg & Ricki Stern (Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work).

"It’s exciting to finally unveil the full scope of this program.. The Sundance Film Festival is the perfect venue to reach the most talented people in and around this business," said CINELAN co-founders Morgan Spurlock and Karol Martesko-Fenster. Jack Myers, project producer, added "The concept is to build a traveling nonfiction film series; we will be inviting filmmakers from every corner of the earth to join us in creating short films about game-changing innovation." CINELAN’s Managing Director Douglas Dicconson adds, "It’s important to everyone associated with FOCUS FORWARD that we’re in a position to reward the filmmakers directly in two ways; first with two hundred thousand dollars in prize money and second by providing a worldwide distribution platform for these films."

John Cooper, director of the Sundance Film Festival, commented "We are thrilled to be collaborating with FOCUS FORWARD to present the first five films in this one-of-a-kind series. We’re known for supporting documentary filmmakers in the Sundance community and around the world, so getting the word out about the Filmmaker Challenge is a natural extension of our creative mission. We’re also delighted to note that this relationship goes beyond 2012 with the Filmmaker Challenge awards ceremony at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival."

In addition, representatives for FOCUS FORWARD - Short Films, Big Ideas announced that they will be working with the 2012 Berlinale Talent Campus #10 on the occasion of its 10th anniversary to host a series of panel discussions around short-form documentary. Jessica Yu and Phil Cox will join the list of FOCUS FORWARD filmmakers who will be in Berlin to encourage and inspire emerging talents at the weeklong series of lectures, discussions, and hands-on training.

"There’s no better way to inspire the next generation of great international filmmakers than to put them in dialogue with some of the world’s foremost practitioners of documentary,” said Matthijs Wouter-Knol and Chritine Tröstrum, managers of the Berlinale Talent Campus. “FOCUS FORWARD is committed to fostering young talent and we are proud to enlist their support on this 10th anniversary edition of our creative summit."

After Sundance and Berlin, additional FOCUS FORWARD films will premiere as curated collections at the Tribeca Film Festival and International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), both strategic partners of the program, and at major festivals in Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Africa, South America, and the Middle East throughout 2012.

The five films premiering at Sundance are:

• Meet Mr. Toilet (Dir. Jessica Yu, 2012) – Oscar-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu (In the Realms of the Unreal) introduces us to Jack Sim, AKA Mr. Toilet, who uses unorthodox methods as he travels the globe raising awareness about the lack of sanitation in underdeveloped countries.
• Hilary's Straws (Dir. Phil Cox, 2012) – UK director Phil Cox (The Bengali Detective) unveils a moving mini-portrait of Hilary Lister, a quadriplegic champion sailor whose metal-and-circuit-board navigational tool, invented with friends, led her to conquer the oceans of the world.
• The Landfill (Dir. Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit, 2012) – Training their eye on a facility in Delaware County, New York, Edwards and Hustwit (Helvetica) challenge the way we look at landfills, not as an ever-growing problem, but as a possible source of renewable energy.
• Heart Stop Beating (Dir. Jeremiah Zagar, 2012) - Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream) tells the story of Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier, two visionary doctors from the Texas Heart Institute who in March 2011 successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a "continuous flow" device they developed, proving that life was possible without a pulse or a heart beat.
• Newtown Creek Digester Eggs: The Art of Human Waste (Dir. David W. Leitner, 2012) – Cinematographer/filmmaker David W. Leitner (Trembling Before G-d) looks at the unusual marriage of form and function at the jaw-droppingly beautiful Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, New York.

The IDA is happy to welcome IDA Board Vice President Adam Chapnick as the moderator for our upcoming Doc U on Fair Use on Monday, January 30 at the Cinefamily. Chapnick will be probing panelists Michael Donaldson, Russell Hickey and Mitchell Block on what constitutes fair use of copyrighted material, and how the implications of fair use affect you and your next film.

Adam Chapnick is a Principal at IndieGoGo, where he serves as CEO of Distribber.com, a new-model flat-fee distribution service that places independent films on digital sales platforms such as iTunes, Netflix and Amazon while allowing filmmakers to keep 100% of their revenue. Adam speaks regularly on cutting edge distribution strategies at markets and festivals including Sundance, South By Southwest, Digital Hollywood, AFM, WestDoc, Distribution U at USC, The Conversation, American Cinematheque and elsewhere. Adam proudly serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the International Documentary Association.

Chapnick's experience in the field will no doubt help the panelists and audience members unravel the legal intricacies of fair use. We're looking forward to a lively discussion for friends of the IDA and extended members of the documentary family!

Doors to the Cinefamily will open at 7pm. Be sure to buy your tickets in advance to ensure your seat at this event. Remember, IDA Student Members get their Doc U tickets for only $5!

Doc U is the International Documentary Association's series of educational seminars and workshops for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers. Taught by artists and industry experts, participants receive vital training and insight on various topics including: fundraising, distribution, licensing, marketing, and business tactics.

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