A grim but necessary piece of reportage, this video documentary is constructed largely from interviews of insurgents in Iraq, who calmly discuss their willingness to kill American soldiers and suspected Iraqi collaborators in a nationalistic and religiously inspired struggle to avenge the invasion of their country and, perhaps, end the American occupation. Journalist filmmakers Steve Connors and Molly Bingham take a genuinely dispassionate view that will unnerve many, but only the most rabid neoconservative could see this detailed, well-produced documentary as in any way a defense of the insurgency.
Indeed, there is no effort to pretty up the details. One interview subject, discussing Americans maltreatment and torture of detainees, says that he wouldn’t wish such pain even “on a Jew.” Later, gruesome footage of the desecrated bodies of murdered American paramilitary contractors being dragged through the streets of Fallujah is included. (That American-led reprisal by some accounts killed as many as six thousand civilians). The insurgents onscreen repeatedly discuss the need to prevent civilian casualties though, clearly, many insurgents disagree with that need and, in any case, everyone on camera seems to live in a culture more concerned with “honorable” death than with preserving life. While the act of interviewing insurgents necessarily involves concealing the identities of the subjects through various means, “Meeting Resistance” succeeds in giving the terrorist struggle against the U.S. military occupation an all too human face that is, otherwise, completely invisible to most Americans.
