November 15, 2009  

Human Terrain, a documentary by the Watson Institute's Global Media Project, won the Audience Award at the 50th Festival dei Popoli this month in Florence, Italy. The documentary explores the controversy over a new US military strategy to use "culturally aware" soldiers and embedded social scientists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Festival de Popoli, the oldest documentary film festival in the world, was founded in 1959 by a group of humanities scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnologists, and experts in mass media seeking to promote and study social documentary cinema. The festival brings together some of the best international documentary productions and was held this year from November 1 to 7.

Human Terrain is the most recent film by Institute Professor James Der Derian and filmmakers David Udris ‘90, and Michael Udris ‘91 of Udris Film and Brown University's Department of Modern Culture and Media. Der Derian and the Udris brothers previously collaborated on Virtual Y2K and After 9/11.

The filmmakers traveled from the cultural warfare training facility at the 29 Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in California to the behind-the-scenes debates in universities over the use of academics in military operations, and finally to the Human Terrain System in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Along the way, they capture all sides of the controversy surrounding the Human Terrain System, defined by the military as an attempt "to improve the military’s ability to understand the highly complex local socio-cultural environment in the areas where they are deployed."

In the process of making the film, questions about the collaboration between academics and the military end on a human note, as an advisor to the film, Michael Bhatia '99, joins the first Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan and is killed by a roadside bomb in May 2008.

The details of the new military counterinsurgency strategy and the tragic story of Michael Bhatia’s participation in the Human Terrain program merge in the documentary to examine what occurs when war becomes academic and when academics go to war.

Der Derian dedicated the festival’s award to the memory of Michael Bhatia, who graduated from Brown University magna cum laude with a degree in international relations and returned to Brown as a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute from July 2006 to June 2007 to work on the Cultural Awareness in the Military Project, while also completing his PhD dissertation at the University of Oxford.

The film was produced by Udris Films and the Watson Institute’s Global Media Project, which analyzes the role of media in international affairs and produces media about pressing global issues. The project is funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Human Terrain was also screened on November 10 at Denmark’s CHP:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.