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The first installment in Kino21’s series that explores soldiering and war from the point of view of those on the ground, Iraqi Short Films is a compilation of short videos shot in the midst of war by American and British soldiers, Iraqi militia members, and corporate workers. These are not “films” per se. They are a mix of slices of life recorded on video (many shot while firing on the enemy or being fired upon), pithy propaganda pieces, and soldiers’ visions of war as just another music video.  They are crudely shot fragments, some rife with raw fear, some gloating over momentary victory. Filmed mainly as records, for friends, family, or fellow fighters, and at one point or another put on the web or on local television, the pieces were culled by Andrizzi over several months. Ranging from the banal to the intense, from the shocking to the darkly humorous, Andrizzi’s compilation depicts war as experienced, articulated, and vividly imagined by those actually fighting and dying in it.

Mauro Andrizzi is an Argentinean scriptwriter and filmmaker born in Mar del Plata in 1980. He studied scriptwriting and graduated from the ENERC (National Film School), Buenos Aires, in 2001. He wrote his first short films as a student 'Blue Room' (1999), 'Terminal Beach' (2000), 'Three versions of a robbery' (2000), 'Neighbours' (2001) and the film-thesis 'Rain' (2001), and worked in several TV shows in Buenos Aires after his graduation. Since 2001, he has been a programmer for the Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina). His works have been screened at major international film festivals. They include 'Color and Pixel' (2006), a documentary short film shot at the Museum of Art History in Vienna, 'Mono' (2007, documentary/feature film) and 'Iraqi Short Films' (2008), a compilation of video snippets shot by a cross section of amateur documentarians.