Vice co-founder Suroosh Alvi, whose record label is home to Bloc Party, Chromeo, The Streets, The Black Lips, and Panthers, plans to get Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda into a state-of-the-art recording studio, then onto Ozzfest 2008 — but first he has to help get them out of danger and to a safe country.

“If we can get in trouble for this, then so be it,” says Alvi, who has followed his convictions since starting the edgy counter-culture magazine, Vice, in 1996 out of Montreal.

Acrassicauda — dubbed “Iraq’s only heavy metal band” because it is the only one known to have performed on a stage — is the subject of Vice Films’ moving documentary “Heavy Metal In Baghdad,” co-directed by Alvi and fellow Torontonian Eddy Moretti, and executive produced by Academy Award-winning director Spike Jonze (“Adaptation,” “Being John Malkovich”). Right now, the band members are living in Damascus, Syria, where the government has refused to renew their visas.

“They’re going to start kicking Iraqis back and their visas are expiring in the middle of October,” says Alvi, who is based in New York, but traveled to Iraq and Syria.

Vice had covered their story — from surreptitiously rockin’ out in Baghdad to attempting to start over in Damascus — through a series of filmed segments on VBS.tv, Vice’s Internet television channel whose creative director is Jonze. The full-length documentary recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, but things have taken a turn for the worse for Acrassicauda and Alvi and Moretti have started a fundraising campaign to help out these guys they now consider friends.

As the band wrote early this month in a blog on www.heavymetalinbaghdad.com, “We have been denied the right to be there in the film festival of Toronto in Canada for many reasons, as they said in the Canadian embassy for the second time, and as many of you heard that we are not able to perform or to play our music any more as a band all together for a lot of reasons. Plus there is no way to make living so after all there is no chance other than going back to Iraq where the chances of staying alive there are zero%.”

Alvi says that since the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. has let in less than 500 Iraqi refugees and Canada half that amount, while Syria has welcomed more than a million and Jordan some 400,000.

Alvi and Moretti have made it their mission to raise $20,000 to get singer Faisal; bassist Firas, along with his wife and child; guitarist Tony; and drummer Marwan (their surnames have been withheld by request) to a safe neighbouring country, until they figure out the next step. They have raised $8000 to date.

Ultimately, Alvi would like to bring them to North America, where they can realize their dream of playing heavy metal. But how does Acrassicauda measure up? Could they get a recording contract were they from the West? In “Heavy Metal In Baghdad,” we see their rehearsals and their live show, and even the results of an impromptu recording session in Syria, but it’s hard to tell if the snippets we hear of the actual original songs (such as “Massacre,” “The Orphan Child,” “Between The Ashes” and “Underworld”) are any good.

“Well, in my opinion, what this band needs is a month — a month to practice with normal equipment in a normal environment, what we consider to be the normal playing field for bands,” says Alvi. “And if they have that month, then they are good to go. They will be a great metal band, and not be a band that will be considered pretty good for Iraqi refugees living in Syria. And I think that’s what they want more than anything else.”

Throughout the course of the film, one gets to know these four well-spoken young men (albeit, they do like to swear and use the word “dude”), who simply want to live in a free society, where they can grow their hair, head-bang, write metal music and play concerts. They sport rock shirts of Metallica, Slipnot, Slayer, and Scandinavian band Dimmu Borgir that they bought on the Iraqi black market, which is also how they get hold of the music, according to Alvi.

In the band’s six years together, it only played six concerts in Iraq and two in Syria. Alvi and Moretti travelled to Baghdad for the first time during Saddam Hussein’s reign. The directors hoped to arrive in time to shoot Acrassicauda’s concert at a youth festival, but they got stuck in Beirut and Acrassicauda didn’t want to postpone the show. “They had no way of letting their fans know and if the fans show up and there’s no concert and they’re there as a group, they were putting their fans’ lives at risk,” explains Alvi.

Alvi and Moretti arranged for Iraq-based Vice Magazine correspondent Johan Spanner to film it. The band had to get permission to play from the Culture And Media Ministry, which imposed the condition that Acrassicauda perform a song for Hussein. The band wrote “The Youth Of Iraq” for the occasion. “It’s a song that they had a lot of trouble reconciling because they didn’t believe in it,” says Alvi. “They did it so that they could play a show.”

The concert footage shows an all-male audience “headbanging” very low to the ground, almost like the knee-bending Russian dance move. “I think that was because they were afraid to properly headbang because it was illegal. They could get in trouble for it,” Alvi believes.

Asked what exactly is illegal and he says “frowned upon” might be more accurate. “They’re supposed to sit down at concerts and the banging their head thing, moving it back and forth, is one problem. Second problem is if you’re standing up and doing it, you’re making yourself a target. I think out of fear of being targeted, they were afraid to stand up and headbang like metalheads do in the [rest of the] world.

“Since Saddam Hussein was toppled, things got even weirder for them,” Alvi continues. “I think during Saddam Hussein’s time, [what was frowned upon] was being passionate about music from the West, and the headbanging, as Firas says in the movie, people would think is a Jewish prayer [rocking back and forth known as shukkeling], so that was one was thing, but after Saddam fell, and there was the rise of the insurgency, they started receiving death threats for being Satan worshippers. So it wasn’t even that it was illegal; it was straight up death threats [that made them play metal underground].”

When Alvi and Moretti finally arrived in Baghdad, they were told that the building that Acrassicauda rehearsed in had been hit by a scud missile. They went there to film the destruction — including the band’s instruments, which lay blackened and in pieces.

“Things were so bad in Baghdad that they weren’t comfortable taking us to their homes, so we always had to choose a location very carefully,” says Alvi who wore a bulletproof vest while there and was surrounded by armed security/guides. “They chose where they felt was safe for them to go, where it wasn’t really a public place, so if they were seen with us, they wouldn’t be seen as colluding with Westerners, which would then get them shot by insurgents.”

Some time later, after Alvi and Moretti returned to America, they checked up on the band members again and discovered they had all fled to Syria and had resurrected Acrassicauda. The directors decided to pick up on the story and flew to Damascus. There, life was tough for the “rock ‘n’ roll refugees.” They took whatever paid work they could, menial labour for as little as $100 a week for 12-hour days, every day.

When Faisal, Firas, Tony and Marwan mention how they’d love to record their music, Alvi and Moretti search high and low for a recording studio. They find a digital studio typically used to record traditional Syrian music. The resulting three-song demo — “Underworld,” Between The Ashes” and “Massacre” — can be heard on MySpace.com/Acrassicauda, but the band members do not want it released commercially.

“They’re incredibly confident about the music that they make, which is why the recordings that we made [in Syria], it was more just an exercise, and they didn’t see it as their best foot forward,” says Alvi. “The studio wasn’t the right kind of studio either. They only had two mics in the whole place and they had never recorded a band before, so everything was against them. So to judge them based on those recordings isn’t really fair.”

Alvi has made a commitment to the guys that Vice Records will throw them in a proper recording studio, with proper gear and sufficient time, if and when they arrive in the Western World.

“I see them on Ozzfest next summer,” says Alvi, optimistically. “That would be the plan. That’s what they want.”

But first they have to raise $20,000 in the next week or so. Vice sent out a press release through its 17 offices and Toronto’s International Freedom of Expression eXchange (ifex.com) emailed it to 20,000 names. Now Alvi plans to step back and hope his efforts work.

“We don’t really want to take an unnecessary risks,” he says. “On some level, we’ve outed them already by having made this movie about them and people have seen this inside of Iraq and contacted them, and it’s put even more pressure on them. There’s people in Iraq saying, ‘Come back to Mosul [a city in the north of Iraq near the Syrian border]; we’ll take care of you.’ So much subtext, it’s insane. ‘Come back; we’ll kill you.’ And even though it’s legal, this plan that the band has concocted, we just don’t want anything to go wrong.”

More Lowdown stories