Irish Film Institute -Gunner Palace

Gunner Palace

Director: Michael Tucker

Germany. 2004| 85 mins


‘A raw, intimate and improbably funny portrait of the war in Iraq¼ It is not a movie anyone should miss’ New York Times ‘I’m going to Baghdad next week. Do you want to come?’ Documentary filmmaker Michael Tucker got the call from a friend, a German armored vehicle salesman, who invited Tucker to grab his camera and ride into Iraq on a business junket. It was May, 2003, not long after George Bush
declared the end of major combat. At the time, Tucker didn’t know what he was getting into. It would be the first of four life-changing trips Tucker would make in the next ten months to document US soldiers in what everyone thought was a post-war peacekeeping mission. ‘The war wasn’t over — it was basically just starting,’ says Tucker. His riveting documentary, Gunner Palace, features the day-to-day experiences of the 2-3 Field Artillery Battalion (also known as the Gunners), who were stationed in one of the most outrageous places in
Baghdad — a bombed out Pleasure Palace once owned by Saddam Hussein. ‘For y’all this is just a show,’ one soldier says, ‘but we live in this movie’.

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