Dodge Billingsley, documentary film producer and director of Combat Films and Research, will speak about “Ordinary Men: A Profile of the Chechen Insurgents and their Tactics” Wednesday, March 23, at noon in 238 Herald R. Clark Building at Brigham Young University.
Billingsley began covering conflict in 1993, work that has taken him to many wars and contested regions including Bosnia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Peru, Bolivia, eastern Turkey, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, western China, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya. He splits his time between documentary film, writing, lecturing, and consulting. He recently co-authored “Operation Anaconda: America’s First Major Battle in Afghanistan" (forthcoming fall 2011), as he was among the few on the ground to document the U.S.-led Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan’s Shah i Kot Valley in 2002.
Billingsley has traveled in and out of the Caucasus many times since 1993 and is currently writing a book on Chechen tactics for the U.S. Marine Corps based on dozens of first person interviews collected from Chechen combatant veterans. He is also producing a film on the Korean peninsula, the latest in the “Beyond the Border” series of films of international scope for the Kennedy Center. Previous programs in the series include “Chechnya: Separatism or Jihad?” and “Global Car.”
In 2003, he was a finalist for the Rory Peck award for Best Feature, for his film “Virgin Soldiers”, which follows a squad of Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom 1. In 2002, Billingsley won the Rory Peck award and the Royal Television Society award for Best Feature, for “House of War,” which documented the battle for Qala Jangi fortress in Afghanistan.
This lecture is hosted by the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies and will be archived at kennedy.byu.edu/archive. For more information, contact Lee Simons at (801) 422-2652 or lee_simons@byu.edu.
Writer: Mel Gardner
