21 Days to Nawroz Wins Best of Show
by Andrew Cleary

When Michelle Mama traveled to northern Iraq in March 2008 to interview Kurdish women about their lives, she knew there would be risks involved. She and her camera operator, Jennifer Polo, were the only crew, except for a handful of local translators, guides, and "fixers". She found herself working in an unstable country far from her Toronto home.

Mama and Polo could adjust to the difficulty of keeping a low profile, even as she recognized that two women shuttling around Kurdistan with digital cameras and a boom microphone was "probably the most conspicuous thing you can do." They could understand their powerlessness to go out at night unaccompanied, for reasons safety-related and cultural. "It's a challenge," she says, "but you have to respect the place you're in" and the customs they follow.

But Mama admits she was shaken when midway through their month-long visit, when a terrorist attack struck the hotel in which they had initially intended to stay. At that point "it all became very real," she says. The bombed hotel and other sites around the city of Sulaimaniyah, less than fifty miles from the Iranian border, "went on lockdown." Security forces set up everywhere, and Mama and her crew wondered about their safety.

Mama realized it was a matter of context. "The next day, everyone got up, everyone went to work. That's just another day in Iraq." She was struck by the equanimity in the Kurds she saw across the city and region. "It was humbling," she says, to consider her fears in the light of what the families there experienced as a matter of course. "Who are we to jump on a plane and get out of here," she thought, "when people are going on with their lives?"

It is this deep sense of empathy that animates 21 Days to Nawroz, Mama's Accolade Best-of-Show-winning documentary of the lives of three Kurdish women in the three weeks leading up to Nawroz, the festival of the New Year. The documentary relates, in their own words, the stories of Banaz, a young student at an American University, Razaw, a feminist lawyer who defends women victimized by their families, and Alwan, a survivor of Saddam Hussein's 1988 chemical attack on the city of Halabja. As these three prepare to celebrate the feast of the new year with their friends and family, they confront the suffering, painful history, difficult present, and hopeful future for themselves and the women of Kurdistan.

Mama, who has years of production experience directing, producing, and story editing for lifestyle and reality programs (for the past three years with Tricon Films and Television) first conceived the documentary idea in the fall of 2008. That's when she reunited with her cousin Sherizan Minwalla, who had been working on women's issues in Iraq for Heartland Alliance, the Chicago-based human-rights advocacy organization. Minwalla told her of the plight of Kurdish and Iraqi women the Center worked with, and she realized "this would be a phenomenal story, because no one has told it yet."

Mama proposed her documentary idea to her executive producers at Tricon, Andrea Gorfolova and Jameel Bharmal. Not only did they support her proposal, but they also agreed to let her do it her own way. "I told them, 'I'm not in this for the money. I want to do this to tell the story.' They gave me the green light and I was actually kind of shocked." Tricon is now the sole distributor of 21 Days to Nawroz.

With her employer's graces to take leave from work, Mama turned to Heartland Alliance. The organization and Minwalla arranged for translators and drivers to be "ready on the ground" for Mama, who found on arrival that the stories of Kurdish women required a special kind of treatment.

"Everyone thinks that things are fine in the north of Iraq," Mama says, because it receives less attention than the often-reported chaos in Baghdad and the south of the country. But Mama felt she had to show the full truth of these women's lives, and moreover, to do so in their voices. "My biggest goal," she says, was that "I didn't want to impose a voice over."

"There are all sorts of tricks to the trade" of producing a documentary, including using a voice-over track, but that "imposes your own story on the subject. It's not as powerful." It was more powerful, and more important, to Mama to respect these women and their stories. Women in that part of the world don't get to express themselves. They aren't heard from. I wanted to give them the microphone and say, 'I want to tell your story.'"

To reach that goal, Mama worked with light and fast equipment, on a budget of "ten dollars and a pack of life savers," to reduce as much as possible the logistical challenges of shooting in a conservative, sometimes violent country. For audio, Mama used a boom microphone and two wireless microphones, recording directly into the camera. No DAT, no mixer. "It's shocking how good the sound was." And because they didn't want to be encumbered by stacks of tape stock, she and Polo decided to shoot with a Sony PMW EX-1 camera, which offers true high-definition video with a tapeless system. It also presents a unique set of challenges to filmmakers used to working with stacks of tapes.

The biggest challenge in transitioning to memory cards was learning to trust the digital copies as Mama would transfer a day's footage from memory card to hard drive to free space on the card for the next day's shooting. "It's terrifying," Mama says, "because as soon as you erase that card, it's gone." So how can a crew be sure they are preserving their footage on a dangerous trip halfway around the world? "The key is redundancy," she says. "Copy to multiple drives, keep duplicate drives hidden in places," and make sure, when "the tape is now the hard drive," to have "all footage intact times two."

After returning from Iraq, Mama and her editor Christopher Field turned to the task of condensing 75 hours of footage into a compelling, concise final edit. At the same time, she started researching festivals to submit the movie to, and came across MovieMaker magazine's announcement that the Accolade was one of "25 festivals worth the entry fee." Mama was intrigued by the announcement, but more so by the Accolade's criteria for submissions.

"I only had an earlier cut, because we were still editing," she says. Most film festivals were only interested in seeing a final version. But the Accolade was okay with it. "That made me realize the people watching these films get it. It's not about your perfect, final, corrected copy, but it's about the story you are telling."

"It was a great surprise and honor to win" the Best of Show award, Mama says, and a great boost to her team. "It's hard when you're cutting a film, because you're working in a vacuum," she says. "After a certain point, you've lost perspective. Is this even a good film? Will anyone want to see this?"

"It gives you the confidence to move forward to know that a festival like the Accolade has given you the thumbs up." With plans to submit 21 Days to Nawroz to festivals through the fall, winter, and spring of 2010, Mama says the Best of Show award is "A great start. It's a very, very nice way to kick off the life of the film."

Nawroz is the first day of spring, and Mama says, "I liked ending the movie with a new beginning." While the movie starts on its own new life, she thinks back on the lessons it has taught her. "Sometimes being naïve is your biggest asset," she says. "If I knew what I was going into, would I do it again? Probably, but I would be terrified." And for all the planning she and her team made going in to Iraq, one day's attack left her with a lasting message for herself and her fellow filmmakers. "Don't overthink" the project, because "the minute you think you have it figured out, it will change."