This is week old news, but here is our announcement nonetheless: Hometown Baghdad won three Webby Awards! It’s an incredible honor and we’re absolutely thrilled.
Of the four categories we were nominated in, we won the following:

• News and Politics Series
• Public Service and Activism
• Reality

A huge congratulations to our fellow winners and nominees. If any Hometown Baghdad fans are going to the award ceremony or any associated after parties, be sure to seek me out and say hello. (Extra points to the person who introduces me to Stephen Colbert.) Look for the guy with the beard…though I imagine in a room full of internet geeks, I won’t be the only one sporting a scruffy look. I will be with the Chat the Planet team and Fady Hadid, the Iraqi producer of HTB who was crazy enough to work with us in the middle of friggin’ war zone.

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In our quest to bring the stories of Hometown Baghdad to television, we are looking for a few translators in the New York area who can understand the Iraqi dialect. Ideally, native Iraqis are best for the position because some of the footage contains Iraqi slang. Translators would need to start as soon as possible and can work days or nights. One benefit of this position is that we will teach you how to enter translations directly into editing computers. This will make you a more valuable translator in the future! And of course, this is a paid position.

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A friend forwarded me an invitation to a showcase of recent documentary films made by students at the Baghdad Film School. The night looks fantastic for fans of Hometown Baghdad and anyone interested in the situation in Iraq.
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The films being screened include:

Baghdad Days (35 mins) (directed by Hiba Bassem, 2005). Hiba Bassem, a young woman from Kirkuk , returns to Baghdad after the war, to finish her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts . The film is a diary of her year as she tries to find a place to live, looks for work, graduates from college, deals with family problems and struggles to come to terms with her position as a woman on her own.

This film won a New Horizon silver award at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival in Doha (2006) and a golden award at the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival (2006).

A Candle For The Shabandar Cafe (25 mins) (directed by Emad Ali, 2007). Founded in 1917, the Shabandar Cafe in Al Mutanabbi Street in the heart of the old centre of Baghdad , was a cultural landmark, where generations of Iraqis came to discuss and debate literature and politics - a living repository of Iraqi intellectual history and one of the last places where people could gather to exchange ideas. Emad had shot most of his film by the end of 2006, but in March 2007, a
massive car bomb destroyed the Shabandar Cafe, all the bookshops on Al Mutanabbi Street and killed and wounded scores of people. Days later, Baghdad ’s poets and artists held a wake in the ruins of the street they loved so much and Emad took a small camera and went back to film. As he was leaving he was attacked, his camera stolen and he was shot in the legs and chest, and his own story is an epilogue to his film about the Shabandar Cafe and Mutanabbi Street - before and after they were destroyed.

Dr Nabil (15 mins) (directed by Ahmed Jabbar, 2007)
A gentle and committed surgeon, with literary talents, works at a small understaffed Baghdad hospital, which suffers from lack of equipment and medicines. While many other doctors have been killed or have fled the country in fear of their lives, Dr Nabil has decided to stay. He worries, though, about the effect that the atmosphere of violence and brutality is having on his young son.

Time & Location:
Wednesday April 30th, 7pm
Millennium Film Workshop, 66 East 4th Street New York , New York

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We put them back up here. The YouTube videos are still down.

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Now that I got your attention, allow me to disappoint. There is no scandal or disagreement. We at Chat the Planet continue to think YouTube is an incredible force in media that allows unusual stories like those in Hometown Baghdad to find an audience. However, the truth is that we are in the process of finding television distribution for Hometown Baghdad and we want to make sure the process goes smoothly. Television distribution for Hometown Baghdad would dramatically increase the amount of people that get to meet Ausama, Adel and Saif. Their stories and lives would be able to bring unseen realities of life in Baghdad to an even greater audience than we’ve already reached. It’s an incredible opportunity for us, for the videos and for our three friends.

To those of you who have blogged about HTB and embedded or linked to our videos from YouTube, I’m sorry. Same goes for people who have recently forwarded YouTube links to friends.

Meanwhile, the videos will be made available on our website on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.

Update: The HTB videos are back on our site. Watch away!

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Hometown Baghdad viewers should know that when Saif isn’t booby-trapping his house with barbwire, smoking shisha, or talking about his beautiful wife Noor, he is playing guitar. And so he has decided to make a series of instructional videos for people wanting to learn how to play in a variety of styles. Here are the first two. If you like them, subscribe to his youtube channel.

Lesson 1: Triple Stroke Rasgueado

Lesson 2: Forward Arpeggio

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We have confirmed that we’ll be releasing the first three webisodes of Hometown Baghdad on Monday, March 19th. That date is significant because it is the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. A lot has changed for normal, everyday Iraqis in these past four years and hopefully our series will show the world what their lives are like today. However dramatic and moving these stories are, we intend this series to be apolitical. Perhaps it will spur some dialogue or make a few people think differently. And that may be good. But as filmmakers and producers, we simply want to introduce these people and tell their stories.

After the initial three webisodes premiere, we will debut a new webisode on Wednesday the 21st and then again on Friday the 23rd. After that, a new video will come out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday thereafter for the next several weeks.

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