In the groundbreaking documentary “The War Tapes,” N.H. filmmaker Deborah Scranton handed cameras to twenty soldiers from the N.H. National Guard and asked them to film their own war, as they saw it

Sergeant Zack Bazzi could be any other civilian in line at the Starbucks in Market Square. He’s wearing jeans and a plain navy blue hoodie. The collar of his white T-shirt, barely visible, hides most of the silver chain around his neck. He has dark hair and long lashes, and he punctuates his conversation by gesturing with both hands.

But he’s not an average civilian, and not an average soldier, either. Bazzi recorded 50 videotapes over 11 months while serving in a combat unit in Iraq. His footage and his point of view, along with that of several fellow soldiers, feature prominently in a first-of-its-kind documentary, “The War Tapes,” which won Best Documentary at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, Best International Documentary at BritDoc, and is currently short-listed for an Academy Award nomination.

“The War Tapes” screens at The Music Hall on Thursday and Friday, Dec. 7 and 8. Bazzi will be present on Friday to answer questions after the film. The director, New Hampshire resident Deborah Scranton, will be present on Thursday.

It’s hard to imagine a new line of questioning for 27-year-old Bazzi. He has traveled to more than 12 festivals with the film. He’s been mentioned or quoted by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly. When Bazzi, who is currently a UNH undergraduate student in international affairs and psychology, realized that the film was becoming “a big deal” last spring, he typed up talking points to better handle the press. Now he Googles reporters, myself included, to prep for interviews.

When asked what angle of the film has not been covered, he says, “What, you want me to do your job for you?”

This is exactly the type of response you’d expect from Bazzi after meeting him onscreen. He speaks his mind. In one early scene, Bazzi asks his platoon leader how he feels about deployment, then quickly adds, “Just a second here, he’s an officer so you are going to get a political answer.” The officer smiles, delivers an agreeable, mission-positive response and Bazzi wryly says, “Good stuff, sir, thank you for the honest and forthright answer.” The platoon leader laughs. Not the kind of exchange you see on the nightly news.

“The War Tapes” is a documentary told from a point of view rarely, if ever, seen before—by subjects on the front lines. The pop of artillery comes from weapons shooting at real targets.

Sequences shot along the MSR (or major supply route) take place while soldiers perform convoy security. Soldiers slap five with Iraqi boys selling two-foot-long knives. With additional footage shot by the film crew, “The War Tapes” follows the preparation, deployment and homecoming of Bazzi, Sergeant Stephen Pink and Specialist Michael Moriarty, all from the New Hampshire National Guard.

When director Deborah Scranton received an invitation to embed with Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment, of the New Hampshire National Guard, she declined. She says to get the most authentic depiction of the war, she asked instead to put cameras directly in soldiers’ hands. She received approval from N.H. National Guard Public Affairs Officer Maj. Greg Heilshorn, and she explained her idea to the soldiers in person, asking them to trust her with their stories. Bazzi and 20 others volunteered.

“We are a country at war. We need to know what war looks like, smells like and tastes like. I am trying to tell the story from the inside out instead of from the outside in,” Scranton says.

Scranton supplied the soldiers with Sony mini-DV cameras, which they affixed to helmets, Humvee dashboards and weapons at will. Between March 2004 and February 2005, they documented more than 800 hours of life both inside and outside the wire of Camp Anaconda, near Balad. They captured everything from the sewage trucks emptying in the desert to the soldiers’ horror after their Humvee accidentally struck and killed an Iraqi woman crossing the street. Sometimes they narrated while they taped. In Bazzi’s case, he often just hit “record,” and let the tape roll.

In one scene, Sergeant Pink, who now works as a carpenter on Cape Cod, points his camera at two higher-ups sitting on bunk beds in a tiny cinder-block room. One officer raises his hand and says, “I’m not supposed to talk to the media.” Sergeant Pink snaps, “I’m not the media. I’m not the media dammit!” To date, the film’s distributor estimates that upwards of 70,000 people have seen the film. Pink may not be the media, but “The War Tapes,” by design, blurs those lines.

“When we were deciding what their credit would be,” Scranton says, “we came up with the term ‘soldiers with cameras.’” Filming was never their top priority, she says, and Bazzi reiterates that point again and again. He is frustrated with reporters who over dramatize or “fill in the blanks with stuff they read,” he says with an eye roll. This confusion prompted him to post a communiqué on the film’s blog, declaring, “I am a soldier NOT a film maker!”

According to Bazzi, training for camera duty amounted to “handing your camera to a guy at a wedding and asking him to take a picture.” Taping was left to the soldiers’ discretion. Bazzi says Moriarty, for example, taped almost five times as much footage as he did. Bazzi rarely looked at tapes after he finished them. Maybe one or two times, he reviewed them if something funny happened or there was a fire fight, to gain tactical knowledge, “the way a football coach goes over plays the next day,” he says. He never looked at the tapes of his fellow soldiers, either. He says they rarely talked about the project at all.

“You have to understand,” he says, “we were in a combat zone. We had better things to worry about.”

The soldiers submitted their tapes to commanding officers, who turned the tapes over to the National Guard public relations office, which eventually turned the tapes over to Scranton. At every point, the U.S. military had the option to review footage. As far as Scranton knows, the only suppressed material is discussed and explained in the film.

The painstaking editing process took editor Steve James (“Hoop Dreams” and “Stevie”) more than a year, sifting through the material and lifting out a narrative thread for Bazzi, Pink and Moriarty. Two other men, Sergeant Duncan Domey and Specialist Brandon Wilkins, are also credited as “soldiers with cameras,” but to simplify and more fully render personalities, the film focused on just three soldiers.

While deployed, the soldiers with cameras communicated with Scranton via e-mail and instant messaging. Bazzi describes his interaction with her as personal, or even trivial in nature. He told her about the books he was reading. She sent him links to interesting news bits. Did she ask him to talk politics on camera? No. Did she ask him to comment on defense contractors KBR or Halliburton (openly criticized by soldiers in the film)? No. “She made basic requests,” says Bazzi, “most of which I ignored.”

On only a handful of occasions did he heed Scranton’s suggestions: He had filmed several hours at night with the camera fixed to the dash of his vehicle. A blinking light on the front of the camera bounced off the windshield’s interior, making images hard to decipher. Weeks later, after Scranton saw the tapes, she recommended putting a piece of tape over the light. Bazzi conceded. But when she asked him go to a quiet place, put the camera on himself, and talk about how he was feeling? Bazzi scoffs, “Hell no!”

It was eight or nine months in, he says, before he put himself on camera at all. And he fielded many of Scranton’s requests for interviews with his mom before he gave Scranton her phone number. “If he hadn’t been ready for me to call his mother, and I had just gone and done it, that could’ve damaged the trust that we had,” says Scranton.

Bazzi shared a particularly troubling incident with Scranton via instant messaging. An Iraqi man had a sick child in his arms and simply wanted to cross a road to enter the hospital. Bazzi, following orders, had to refuse. Scranton, reading a screen at her work studio in Goshen, was immediately moved. But only when she saw Bazzi in person, months later, did she ask him to talk about it on camera. “If we didn’t have that friendship,” says Scranton, “I would never have been able to ask him.”

Scranton’s family has lived in Goshen, N.H., for more than nine generations. Her ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the War of 1812 and World War II. “You can go down to the town plaque and see their names,” she says. It concerns her that with the Iraq war, “You can go weeks at a time without being touched by someone who knows someone serving,” she says.

It is no coincidence that the men featured in her film live nearby. Specialist Moriarty, who enlisted because of Sept. 11, lives in Windsor, a town of 210 residents, with his wife and two children. “Mike Moriarty is my neighbor,” says Scranton. “The National Guardsmen are my neighbors. They are not this ‘other’ to me.”

One of Scranton’s hopes for “The War Tapes” is that it can bridge the disconnect she believes exists between a lot of Americans and the military. To facilitate this connection Scranton makes a habit of asking soldiers, and their family members, to stand at the end of screenings. “You may be sitting next to someone who went through stuff you saw on the screen,” she explains. “It could spark a conversation.”

When the men return from Iraq in “The War Tapes,” a crowd of family and friends breaks into applause as they enter the N.H. National Guard hangar in Concord. A marching band plays. Signs welcome Moriarty and Pink home. Relatives embrace them tightly, tears in their eyes. But no family waits for Bazzi.

Bazzi was born in Lebanon to Shiite Muslim parents. They moved to the United States to escape civil war when he was 10 years old. His parents divorced within months of arrival, and he was raised by his mom in Watertown, Mass. In “The War Tapes” Bazzi’s mother expresses her disbelief and sadness over her son’s choice to purposefully put himself in harm’s way. When they reunite later that evening at his mother’s house, tension fills the living room.

Bazzi sits on one sofa, looking straight ahead. His mother sits on another sofa, looking at him.
“The scene with my mom, at the end, was tough,” says Bazzi, acknowledging that the awkwardness that comes through was real.

Like many first generation Americans, he straddles two cultures. He speaks Arabic, and in the film he often translates between fellow soldiers and Iraqi people. He laughs alongside the Iraqi men he is training to be military police, slapping them on the back. He says this was one of the most meaningful parts of his service.

But his Arab background also makes him a target. One soldier says, straight-faced to the camera, “Today we kill Bazzi and everybody that looks like Bazzi.”

Bazzi brushes this off as a joke, says the guy who said it was kidding around. “I’ve never taken offense,” he says, explaining that in the military, you have to have a thick skin. “If you have a big nose, goofy ears, you’re bald, any noticeable deformity gets made fun of,” he explains. In fact he thinks that nobody cares about his background in the Army. He may hear an occasional ‘What in the hell kind of name is Bazzi?’ but he has faith that it’s a merit-based system: “You work hard, get good fitness reports, get awards, and get promoted.”

He’s satisfied with his steady climb up the ranks over the last nine years. Before Iraq he served in Bosnia, then Kosovo. He volunteered for another overseas deployment with the N.H. National Guard and leaves for Afghanistan early next year.

Back home in New Hampshire, he is often mistaken as Italian. It leads to what he calls “Borat” moments, in which people inadvertently reveal their prejudices because they assume he is one of their own. He tells about waiting for hours to board a plane the day British police uncovered a plan to bomb planes crossing the Atlantic. An older white man leaned to him and said, ‘We should just put all them Arabs onto one airline so the rest of us can fly in peace.’

“It doesn’t take a shrink to tell you ignorance is the first step towards prejudice,” Bazzi says in the film. He also shares his frustration that U.S. soldiers are sent to Iraq with no training on that country’s people or culture.

Even though she is working on two new projects that use a similar filmmaking model, Scranton, as well as Bazzi and their collaborators, are committed to an ongoing dialogue about “The War Tapes” and the complexities of war. The film’s Web site is a living archive of this conversation. Scranton invited Maj. Heilshorn to participate as a guest blogger on the site, Bazzi and others respond to public queries online, and Scranton documents particularly poignant moments from the road.

She recalls an e-mail from a veteran Marine who thanked her because the film made him cry for the first time since he’d been home. Another soldier approached her after a screening, his eyes full of tears. He told her he had hit and accidentally killed a young child, much like a scene in the film.

“He couldn’t tell his family,” she says. “He thought they’d think he was a monster.” He planned to show them “The War Tapes” to help him be able to have that conversation.