Issue 04
DISARM
By Anne KeehnPhotos By Brian Liu
Illustration By Josh Cochran
The last time Brian Liu was in Afghanistan, he made a metal stencil with the word “Disarm,” giving it to local cops and children to spray it on the burnt-out tanks and walls of Kabul. At first, his translator was uneasy about doing graffiti. “He didn’t want to get arrested. So we actually went to the police station and woke up the police chief,” Brian recalls. “It was very much a Jabba the Hut kind of situation. The guards shook him and woke the guy up. He straightened himself up and put his hat on, and he was like, ‘What, what? Yeah, it’s fine!’ It was funny.”
The footage was used in the title sequence of Disarm, a documentary about the global issue of landmines. Mary Wareham, a member of Jody Williams’s 1997 Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), conceived and produced the film. Brian was an old friend of Mary’s, and through his design agency Toolbox DC he had done graphic work for the ICBL. She brought him into the fold early on as creative director, “just for advice, and to do graphics, and maybe still photography,” Brian says.
Some people say control freaks make the best film directors. Brian fits that bill, in that he is a meticulous perfectionist when it comes to work. When he tagged along with Mary to help interview prospective directors, Brian concluded that none of the candidates were appropriate for the job – so she suggested that he be the director.
Mary’s proposal frightened him. “I was nervous as hell,” he recalls. But he thought hard about it. He obsessively watched directors’ commentaries on films like Dark Days, the DJ Shadowscored documentary about a subterranean homeless community in Manhattan, in which filmmaker Marc Singer lived underground with his subjects for two years. He loved Spike Jonze’s atypical documentaries What’s Up Fatlip and Amarillo by Morning, and mulled over films by Jim Jarmusch, Michael Moore, and Wim Wenders. He accepted the job two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin.
Mary started Next Step Productions expressly to raise funds for Disarm. She made it a non-profit to ensure that money could be generated with no political or organizational agenda. They wanted complete creative freedom.
Mary is from New Zealand, and Brian is Chinese-American. The film’s editor is Icelandic, and their main field soundman was a Belgian expat living in Cambodia who had twice been a victim of anti-vehicle mines in Africa. With its intentionally multinational crew, Disarm approached the landmine issue from a global perspective.
Money came in from various governments: Canada, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. Conspicuously absent from the list was the U.S. Along with superpowers Russia and China, the U.S. Is one of 41 nations that have not signed the ICBL’s anti-landmine treaty to date. With the third largest stockpile of mines in the world, the U.S. Is the only NATO member absent from the agreement. To seek money from the U.S. State Department “would have been seen as hypocritical,” Brian says.
Filming for Disarm began in September 2003 in Bangkok at the annual diplomatic conference of the treaty banning landmines. The finished product was screened one year later at the Nairobi Summit on a Mine-Free World, the first review conference of the ICBL’s mine ban treaty.
It was a hectic schedule. Ten months of production and five months of post-production. Footage was shot in Afghanistan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Cambodia, Colombia, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Russia, Thailand, and the U.S.
Conceived and produced as it was by a member of the ICBL for educational purposes, Disarm can be considered an advocacy film. A certain style is typically expected of a documentary like this: authoritative narration, a clear objective, and a firm point of view. Disarm has none of that. Scored by members of Fugazi, with help from Mœm, Thievery Corporation, and the Flaming Lips, the film has a slow-burning aesthetic that is more art-rock than National Geographic. There is no narrator and hardly any text. With little didactic guidance, the images have the complex power of the best photojournalism, ambiguous and multi-layered in a way that forces the audience to interpret on its own.
Brian describes the film as “vibe-based.” Instead of instructing the viewer, Disarm dwells on the silent pall that hangs over communities living on mine-infested land. The film lingers on transient moments when people gaze into the camera or reveal flashes of emotion: a boy on crutches laughing and playing, a Colombian mine victim sobbing after he speaks at a Town Hall meeting, an Afghan woman looking down in shame as she shows her prosthetic leg to the camera.
“My secondary message was for the film to explore a social aspect,” Brian says. “It’s much more about ‘we’re all in this together,’ with ‘this’ being very vague-not really being specifically about landmines. Because right now more than ever in the United States, there’s an attitude of ‘you’re either with us or against us. You’re either here or you’re there. You’re either us, or you’re them.’ That’s fucked up. Everybody is just trying to live their life as best as they can. Some people find themselves threatened, some people find themselves the threat.”
The Iraq sequence is especially unusual. Iraqis arrive en masse to a picnic site, joyously clapping and dancing to loud music blasting from their car radios. Only brief shots of red danger signs and a woman handing out educational fliers on landmine safety suggest that the site is a partially cleared mine field. The subtle pacing and ambiguity is a departure from the Iraq shown in the U.S.’s mainstream media. It shows the humanity of Iraqis celebrating and getting on with life in the midst of war.
Citing Jim Nachtwey, one of his photojournalist heroes, Brian says, “For this kind of work, it’s not about being afraid, it’s how you manage your fear.” But while shooting man-on-the-street interviews in the Iraqi city of Erbil-footage that didn’t make it to the final cut of Disarm-Brian felt truly scared for the first time.
“We were aggressively doing street interviews in Iraq. I went into the city alone, with no soundman, and no one else except for two bodyguards who were armed to the teeth. They gave me rules: Always keep your back to the building, so you can see out; don’t ever stand in one location for more than 10 minutes at a time; don’t let the vehicle out of your sight because someone will put a bomb under it. I’m pretty good in bad situations, but I was nervous. I was always looking at rooftops, because information travels quickly. If some guy sees you, they’re going to run across the roof and tell another guy, and before long, ‘bang bang.’”
Landmines are psychological weapons, eroding people’s sense of security. As a deminer in one of the teasers for the film puts it, “[When] you see the mine, the fear comes. As they say, ‘the soul hides.’”