Television Documentaries: Polemic with a touch of rock'n'roll

A heavy metal band in full flow. Flashing strobe lights and smoke from dry ice. Bouncers trying to hold back head-banging fans from the stage.

The scenes are much like any other from rock concerts. But what is different here is that the lyrics being belted out by System of a Down and chanted by their fans is about the Armenian massacre, Rwanda and Darfur and part of highly polemical film about genocide.

Screamers is the latest in a recent line of feature-length documentaries on hard, gritty subjects to be released in the cinema. Others have included Stephen Spielberg's Munich, Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts about Katrina and, of course, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

Most people who have been to see these films are, one can assume, already interested in the subject matters. Screamers, however, is the first to use a popular band in an effort to reach a younger generation which may not be aware of historic and present-day injustices.

The crowds who turn up for the concerts are given pamphlets by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the band bellow out their thoughts during the performance.

And it appears to be working. Fans questioned as they leave the gigs show a surprising level of knowledge about what is going on in places such as Darfur and the issues are also discussed in their various websites.

Screamers has been co-produced by the BBC and will be shown in the Storyville series on 28 March. It has also done the rounds of various film festivals and received the Audience Award at the American Film Institute festival last November.

The director and producer, Carla Garapedian and Peter McAlevey, are both former journalists and say they took a reporter's approach to gathering backing for the project.

Garapedian, who holds American and British dual nationalities, had worked as a BBC newsreader before going on to make acclaimed documentaries such as Zarmina: Lifting the Veil, about the plight of women in Afghanistan, Children of the Secret State, charting acute deprivation in North Korea and My Friend the Mercenary, examining the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea to which Mark Thatcher was linked.

McAlevey, an American, was formerly a reporter with Newsweek. He had been involved in the production of films including Flatliners and Radio Flyer.

The idea for Screamers came about when a project McAlevey and Garapedian were working on - a comedy about her time at the Beeb - fell through.

Garapedian, of Armenian origin, who has been campaigning to gain international recognition that the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey was genocide, had heard about System of a Down, whose members are also Armenian and involved in the same cause. Like Garapedian, they also wanted to make a stand against the inhumanity which is taking place now in various parts of the world with the West turning a blind eye. They are also hugely successful in their niche market, with sales of 16 million CDs so far.

"It was proving impossible to approach them," recalled McAlevey. "You get this very often, of course, with acts which are doing well. The people around them want to stick with the winning formulae, they do not want to get involved with something new, experimental, which might fail.

"Then I found out the address of Rick Rubin, the guy who looks after them, and my journalist's training kicked in. We wrote a very short, three-paragraph proposal and I just threw it over the wall of his home. We got a call back the next day from his PA. We thought this would be something that works. Don't forget, Spike Lee said that he got more satisfaction from his Katrina film than all his feature films because the sheer scale of the feedback that he got was so much more than from all the others."

It was, however, several months before Garapedian and McAlevey met Serj Tankian, the singer. The most political of the band members - he is moving to New Zealand because he does not want his taxes in the US being spent on invading countries - was immediately enthusiastic.

"I had been with a group of human rights activists outside one of their concerts in the past handing out leaflets and I was amazed by the interest shown by them, not just about Armenia but what was happening in places like Darfur and Iraq, so System were the ideal people to work with.

"This is a golden age for documentaries, perhaps the second one we have had since the 1950s, when there were people who had been shooting the Second Word War bringing their craft and experience in producing hard-edged stuff. Now there is a demand from the public for hard, strong, in-depth documentaries because they are concerned about what is going on around the world.

"I didn't want to make a so-called 'balanced' documentary. I don't believe you can actually have two sides to genocide - either you accept it or you deny it, and the danger lies in the denial."

Tankian says it was only natural that the band should take part in the film. "I have always had a problem with injustice, whether it's personal, national or international. It's just always bothered me to the point where I have to do or say something."

It was perhaps not surprising that the film was commissioned by Storyville, which has built up a reputation for adventurous and innovative programming.

Nick Fraser, the series editor, said, "What I liked about it was that it was attempting to reach a younger audience in an imaginative way. I didn't know much about the band, but there's someone working for me who did. It's an angry film, but it has been made extremely well. I think that people like us should encourage this kind of film-making, because the topics they are addressing are immensely important."

'Screamers' is on BBC4 on 29 March

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