Shot over a period of six years on a minuscule budget and with a cast of nonprofessional actors, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein revisits the experience of the Gulf War through a reverse lens, focusing on the war’s reverberations in America. Set in a different desert, the film presents three stories in three cities as it follows characters whose lives are altered as a consequence of the war: a Mexican-American woman who has acquired the name Hussein through marriage; a teenage boy adrift in his anger and struggling to affect change; a returning veteran indelibly marked by what he has witnessed. Working in the space between fiction and documentary, Gianvito’s film seeks to resurrect the memory of a time that was too quickly filed away but whose tragic consequences continue to be felt, most profoundly among the twenty-two million people of Iraq. Historian Howard Zinn has called it "both a work of art and a critical piece of history...thoroughly engaging as a story and provocative as an examination of American values."