INDIANAPOLIS - An audience gazed on, entranced, as a child screamed out in pain.
A 6-year-old boy filled the halls of a Baghdad hospital with his shouts of dismay as surgeons punctured a hole in his chest to drain blood from his lungs without the relief of anesthesia. The surgeons were risking their lives to save the child's.
This scene was one of many that depicted the struggles and dangers of day-to-day life in Iraq shown in "Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone," a documentary produced by Dr. Omer Salih Mahdi, a Ball State University student and Fulbright Scholar.
The documentary will make its television premiere 8:30 p.m. Tuesday on HBO.
Salih Mahdi showed the film at a debut screening Monday in Indianapolis.
Salih Mahdi, who worked as a medical doctor in Baghdad before coming to the United States, said he risked his life taking film equipment into Al-Yarmouk Hospital to film not only the patients who had fallen victim to warfare, but also to document the risk the medical staff put themselves in.
The film focused on warfare between Shiites and Sunnis, and the effects it has had on the residents of Baghdad, as well as the staff in hospitals.
Salih Mahdi said after the film, doctors were often killed because they treated both Shiites and Sunnis. The doctors risked their lives by allowing their faces to be shown on camera, he said.
"I'm afraid they're going to assassinate us after this film," one doctor said to the camera.
Another scene was filmed inside an ambulance as it rushed a group of Baghdad citizens to the hospital after a bombing in a marketplace. An injured woman in the ambulance shouted out in anguish because she did not know if her son survived the attack.
"Where is Saddam Hussein?" the woman said. "Bring Saddam back. It was not like this before he was gone."
Salih Mahdi said after the film, even though he was an Iraqi native, he put his life in jeopardy while filming the documentary.
"Everybody there was unhappy with me being there with a camera," he said. "I was in danger making the film ... but my concern was my family in making my film."
Ramia Vadri, who lived near Baghdad, stood up during a question-and-answer session following the film and said the horrors it depicted were true to live.
"What I'd seen in the movie, it was home," she said later. "I was in the military in Baghdad, and I had to carry all those people from those bombings off the streets to the hospitals. It was like that every day."
President Jo Ann Gora said after the screening she thought it was interesting for a physician to take the role of a journalist because it gave a different perspective.
"It was very moving," Gora said. "He was able to show us what life was like in Baghdad. That was indescribable."
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