In one of the most dramatic scenes from Sinan Antoon’s documentary About Baghdad, he and his camera crew visit a Baghdad insane asylum still struggling to recover from the ravages of war. During the invasion, American troops had fired on the asylum, allowing several patients to escape and sending the facility into disarray.

Antoon’s camera focuses on a thin, aging man in the advanced stages of dementia clapping his hands above his head and chanting the old slogans of the Saddam Hussein regime. It is just one of the many portraits in Antoon’s film of ordinary Iraqis struggling to come to grips with a society that has been driven literally insane by the forces of history.

When Antoon, a poet, novelist and filmmaker returned to his native Iraq in 2003 after 12 years in exile, he went with a mission. Frustrated by the American media coverage of the war and its effects on the Iraqi people, he sought to collect the stories and testimonies of ordinary Iraqis to gain a truer view of the situation there. By doing this, Antoon hopes to fight what he calls “historical amnesia.” He presented his film to Oberlin students on Thursday in West Lecture Hall.

“Amnesia is nurtured by the simplistic discourse of the mainstream media,” he said. “We have to accept that people can be complex enough to be against Saddam and not embrace America.”

Antoon, a Harvard PhD candidate who teaches at Dartmouth, fled Iraq in 1993. Since then he has published a collection of poetry titled A Prism Wet with Wars, and a novel called Diacritics.

Before presenting the film, Antoon read some selections from his poetry, most of which focused on themes of war and destruction.

“I saw a mother weaving a shroud for the son still in her womb,” read one poem.

Another called “To an Iraqi Infant,” asked, “Do you know that your tomorrow has no tomorrow and your blood is the ink of new maps?”

Antoon’s film About Iraq, which will be sold on DVD over his website next week, has been shown at festivals throughout the world, including the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.

The film is a collection of interviews Antoon collected on his 2003 trip. All the subjects interviewed in the film were glad to be rid of Saddam’s regime and some of the most disturbing moments of the film concern the victims of torture in the regimes prisons, including the now infamous Abu Grahib.

Opinion was decidedly mixed, however, about U.S. troop presence in Iraq.

“Only the pictures have changed,” said one woman, watching U.S. envoy Paul Bremer on TV.

Some express frustration at the lack of basic services like electricity and running water. Others react angrily to the fact that the only facility that U.S. troops had protected from post-invasion looting is the oil ministry.

Antoon makes no secret of his opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and in one of the films’ most telling moments he argues with a Baghdad taxi driver who chastises him, saying, “If you had been here the last five years you would realize that we would take the devil’s hand if it would lift us a little.”

The question of whether occupation is a necessary evil to end the Saddam Hussein’s regime is central to the film.

When asked how he feels about Americans being called occupiers, one U.S. serviceman interviewed in the film responded, “Well, we are.”

While Antoon understands the view that any situation is better than rule by Hussein, he feels that the simplistic view of the situation presented in the American media ignores the nuanced nature of public opinion in Iraq.

“Iraqis are either portrayed as Saddam lovers or Bush lovers,” he said. “Most are neither.”