bad voodoo

no, it's NOT about gris-gris. it's about giving soldiers hand held cameras and making a documentary out of their footage. i'm guessing this is something NONE of us should miss

watch it TOMORROW (TUESDAY) on pbs frontline

FRONTLINE presents BAD VOODOO'S WAR Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
"Here we are. It's about 2:30 in the morning on the 2nd of October. We have been on the road for a while. ... Wasn't too excited to get this change of mission. The stretch of road between Anaconda and Speicher, known as IED Alley, it's probably one of the worst stretches of road in theater."-Sfc. Toby Nunn, during his second Iraq deployment, to his personal mini-DV camera
FRONTLINE goes to war in Iraq with a band of California-based National Guard soldiers who call themselves the "Bad Voodoo Platoon" to tell their very personal story in Bad Voodoo's War, airing Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET (check local listings). To record their war, from private reflections to real-time footage of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks on the ground, director Deborah Scranton (The War Tapes) creates a "virtual embed," supplying cameras to the soldiers of the Bad Voodoo Platoon and working with them to shape an intimate portrait that reveals the hard grind of their war. Says Scranton: "What compels me is telling a story from the inside out, to crawl inside their world with them to see what it looks like, feels like and smells like. It's really important to give soldiers the chance to press their own record button on this war."
GIs Turn Filmmakers in Bad Voodoo's War
By Noah Shachtman
Deborah Scranton didn't have to go to war to shoot her latest documentary about Iraq. Instead, she gave hand-held, high-def cameras to soldiers in the Bad Voodoo platoon, and let them handle this "virtual embed" themselves. The result, Bad Voodoo's War, airs Tuesday night on PBS' Frontline.

Scranton first used the technique in 2006 in The War Tapes, which followed three soldiers from Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the 172nd Infantry Regiment during the rise of Anbar province's Sunni insurgency. Troops and critics almost universally agree it was the clearest, most honest window into the Iraq conflict ever recorded.

But Scranton, in many ways, got lucky, her first time around. She not only found three remarkably compelling and articulate lead characters in Charlie Company, but that trio was involved in some of the heaviest fighting of the war -- Anbar province in 2004. Which meant The War Tapes could draw on both human drama and house-to-house combat.

On her second virtual embed, Scranton got dealt a tougher hand. The Bad Voodoo platoon of the 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment handles security for convoys moving from Kuwait to Iraq. And running trucks in 2007 isn't nearly as action-packed as hunting insurgents in Fallujah in 2004. So Scranton had to burrow deeper into the psychological drama for Bad Voodoo's War. And she had to show that this slow-motion style of conflict can scar its combatants, too.......