As some of you may know my documentary partner on OCCUPATION: DREAMLAND, Garrett Scott, sadly passed away only two days before we were awarded an Independent Spirit Award for the film. It is a blow that many of us are still trying to recover from. While there was no way to move forward with business as usual, it quickly became clear that showing the film was a source of relief. It has been a way to honor Garrett and the work we did together. It is in that spirit that I look forward to sharing the film and some of my thoughts on it with you.

One of the questions I am often asked is, "How did you get the access?" To some it seems incredible that two independent filmmakers could get intimate access to a Forward Operating Base in Iraq and come back with such starkly candid material. In all honesty we weren't sure we could either. That's why it was hard to find significant funding up front. In fact our initial funding consisted of tape stock, airplane tickets and body armor, that's it. We basically just showed up in Iraq and starting contacting Army public affairs officers at the battalion level. Once we were over there, there was almost this sense that we belonged, even if, like Garrett and myself, we had no military training and no prior experience in war zones. There was no high level clearance from back home, really only two guys basically knocking on the gates of FOB Volturno (AKA 'Dreamland') and asking if we could hang out for awhile.

Part of this relaxed policy was of course due to the amazing success, from the military's perspective, of the imbedding program during the initial invasion. The US Military is impressively professional and many of these early reports were simply jingoistic accounts of military prowess. But of course when we got there it was a different story. It was an occupation.

We suspected that the role of an infantry soldier during an occupation would be a conflicted and complicated one. All we could hope was that if they let us hang out long enough, eventually the walls would come down and we'd catch glimpse of something real and unmediated. Toward the end of the film one of the soldiers says, "People want their steak, but they don't want to know how the cow gets butchered." I think when it comes to the war in Iraq people do want to know. That's in many ways what the film seeks to be: an unmediated look at the raw process of occupation.

My filmmaking partner Suki and I were coming back from a film festival in Thailand back in the fall of 1999. We both noticed a very small article on one of the back pages of the International Herald Tribune that talked about a campaign bio of GW Bush being pulled from the shelves.

A couple of weeks later I got a press release at work (I worked at a small alt culture web site) announcing that a small publisher that we worked with would be re-releasing the book. "Fortunate Son" had been the first campaign bio of Bush. It turned out that the book had been pulled because the author had been outed as a convicted felon (he hired someone to kill his boss). This news emerged because an afterword to the book speculated that GW had been arrested for cocaine possesion in the 60's but that his father had gotten him off. This allegation got the book a lot of attention. This attention led to the discovery of the authors past.

At this point GW was running but the election was a full year away and he didn't appear to be too serious a candidate. Cocaine was a big topic until the book came out. After that it kind of disappeared as an issue.

When I got the release I called up Sander Hicks, who ran Soft Skull, and asked him if I could shoot as he worked on his project. "Sure, just come by on Saturday when I do the sweep and mop, you can film me then." He hung up. I had to call back to find out that he was the super of the building that he lived in, squatted the basement of the building as his office and that one of his duties was sweep and mop the halls of the building each week.

Suki and I started shooting that weekend. We were immediately interested because we knew that the film would shine a light on media, and how we consume and process information. We realized right away that we had an interesting character in Sander. We didn't realize how interesting until we'd stuck around for a year.