Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi’s fascinating documentary on Iraq’s only metal band, Acrassicauda (Black Scorpion), is a rough-and-ready affair made for VBS TV, an offshoot of taboo-breaking Vice magazine. The guerrilla-movie-making ethic of the directors is reflected in the band members, who sport goatees and speak excellent, hipster/metalhead-inflected American English.

The band performed the odd thrash concert to small audiences of headbangers under Saddam but found post-Iraq War ‘freedom’ closed even more doors. Moretti and Alvi follow them from 2003 to 2006, as talk moves on from early debates on artistic freedom to matters of survival as missiles are heard in the distance and we see the rubble of their practice space. The band are now in Istanbul, living in poverty like so many of the 2.5 million Iraqi refugees.