13/02/2024
INCIDENT IN NEW BAGHDAD
I've finally uploaded my 2012 Academy Award-nominated short documentary Incident in New Baghdad to YouTube, where you can now watch it in its entirety for free.
The film follows US Army veteran Ethan McCord as he struggles to understand his role in the Iraq War after witnessing the brutal killings of a group of civilians, including two Reuters journalists, at the hands of American helicopter gunners. The release by Wikileaks of the classified cockpit video of the incident generated headlines and controversy around the world, and plunged Ethan into a moral reckoning around an event that he had tried hard to forget.
Many of you here were instrumental in the Kickstarter campaign that enabled me to screen the film for a week in a Los Angeles theater in order to qualify for the Oscars--an outpouring of generosity for which I am forever grateful. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history. Somehow I found myself at the Academy Awards, with my little movie which I literally edited on a laptop in my basement, competing with not one but three films backed by HBO.
"Incident" won a number of film festival honors, including Best Documentary Short at Tribeca, and the subject matter led directly to my national security whistleblower documentary feature SILENCED, produced by Daniel J. Chalfen and Jim Butterworth, which was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2015. - James Spione
In this Oscar-nominated short documentary from director James Spione, a US Army soldier recounts his life altering experiences at the scene of one of the mos...
