MORE fighting goes on in parts of suburban US than Iraq, according to Australian filmmaker George Gittoes who has just finished a documentary set in a Miami "war zone". Gittoes' latest feature, Rampage, contrasts life for a family living in the blue-collar community of Brown Sub, Miami, with ongoing fighting in Iraq."It is much worse in Miami than it is in Baghdad," Gittoes said in Sydney today. "There is a sense of people with guns, drug dealers lairing at you ... and being there, I knew I was in a war zone."
Rampage is the second in Gittoes trilogy of documentaries based on the war in Iraq. It follows the success of 2004s Soundtrack to War, which depicted American soldiers and their music in Iraq.
The film will be released in cinemas around the world and Gittoes is expecting plenty of controversy. "Even left-wing Americans ... don't want to recognise the mess they've got in their own backyard," he said.
Gittoes has spent much of his career travelling the world, painting, filming and photographing wars in places such as Rwanda, Afghanistan, and East Timor. "To me, this was just another war zone and it was in America," he said.
Gittoes said there were similar stories to Rampage in Australia's indigenous communities, although he said the task of translating that on the big screen would be difficult. "The film that I'd like to make in Australia I couldn't make," he said. "All of our politically correct laws and things wouldn't let someone like me make a film like this in an Aboriginal community in Australia."
The final film in the trilogy, Fearless, and will examine the impact of the Iraq war on the American soldiers who have fought there. "It is about the difficulty of exit and how much the soldiers have changed and become hardened warriors and how much the people they're fighting have changed as well," he said.
Rampage opens nationally on November 30.