Iraq in 35mm

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Iraq in 35 mm Home to one of the oldest civilizations and continually inhabited for close to 8,000 years, Iraq has learnt to rise from the ashes again and again. But this knowledge doesn’t necessarily soothe the pain of the living. Filmmaker Mohamed Al Daradji focuses his lens on the war-ravaged country and the untold stories echoing across its plains.

IF YOU WERE PRESENT that Thursday evening in the Museum of Islamic Art’s (MIA) auditorium, you would have seen much surreptitious tear-wiping against the flickering light of the screen. Somewhere among the sparsely populated seats, it’s difficult to pinpoint where, the sniffling that began almost half an hour into the movie didn’t abate until well after the credits stopped rolling, punctuating the anguished sounds of the wailing woman on screen. Director Mohamed Al Daradji, whose love of cinema began as a means of retreat into fantasy, denies his audience this very escapism. His intentions are the diametric opposite: to take his viewers down the dusty

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roads of rural Iraq, through the rubble of its cities and the rugged beauty of its ancient ruins, straight into the hearts of its long-suffering people teeming with weary, decadesold sadness that unpredictably aches and bleeds like a fresh wound.

Son of Babylon was Al Daradji’s second feature film to be selected as Iraq’s official entry to the Oscars, a fact that is clearly indicative of his pivotal role in the “new Iraqi cinema movement”. “There was never a film industry to speak of in Iraq,” he says. His distinctive afro, which you would expect to bob around entertainingly, remains as calm and centered as its owner. “During the

IMAGES COURTESY OF MOHAMED AL DARADJI

BY AYSWARYA MURTHY

not within it. Son of Babylon was released in 25 countries but not in my own,” he says. “We needed to do something.” The 45-odd screenings planned are tenaciously on schedule, according to him, despite the country being in the throes of turmoil due to the looming threat of ISIS militants.

Iraq will somehow weather this crisis, just as it has done others earlier. Like certain years in recent history – 1980, 1991, 2003, 2006 – this too will leave “deep impressions on the mentality of Iraqi people” and will be continually revisited by filmmakers like Al Daradji, drawn by how it will reshape the way of life in the country for years to come. Having left Iraq under tragic circumstances following the execution of his cousin by the Ba’athist regime, Al Daradji didn’t return for close to a decade, during which he studied filmmaking in Holland and the United Kingdom. When he eventually came back in 2003 to shoot his first film, “Ahlam”, it was as if he had landed in a different country. “There was no patch of greenery left in Baghdad. Everything was destroyed, especially people’s psyche,” says Al Daradji. It was an eerie experience. That’s probably why, on the surface, his movies seem to be preoccupied with violence and its impact on THE SEARCH Scenes from “Son of Babylon”, which traces the journey of a young boy and his grandmother in search of his father who has been missing for more than a decade.

Saddam regime, films were mostly government-sponsored propaganda, and the lone television channel exclusively telecast Saddam’s speeches. With the American invasion in 2003 and the ensuing violence, the production and screening of independent movies became unthinkable.” In the psyche of the average Iraqi, everything aside from concerns of immediate survival has been relegated to the bottom of the pile. And it is in this claustrophobic climate of fear, where you “can’t build a theater without worrying about it being destroyed by a car bomb”, that Al Daradji and fellow filmmaker Oday Rasheed are slowly but surely laying the foundations of ‘Baghdadwood’, through the Iraqi Independent Film Center (IIFC).

Al Daradji is in Doha for Doha Film Institute’s Hekayat Khaleejiya — Stories from the Gulf. Two of his feature films are being shown, but he doesn’t watch them with the rest of the audience, choosing only to make an appearance towards the end for the Q&A session. But he stays for the screening of the six short films from Iraq. With a cast entirely made up of children from a local orphanage, the stories depict, in stark contrast, innocence against the backdrop of unrelenting violence. One is shot entirely in a graveyard and another gives a glimpse of the American occupation through a young boy’s sketches. Each one is a testimony to the resilience of the Iraqi people, lovingly crafted by the 20 students currently learning filmmaking at the center.

Not only have the IIFC and Al Daradji helped these short films see the light of day, they are also taking them to the people to whom it would mean the most. The events and festivals division of the center holds an annual three-month-long mobile cinema film festival, the fourth edition of which was moving through the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah and its surrounding villages, plastic chairs, projectors and all, even as Al Daradji was addressing film enthusiasts in the plush indoor auditorium at MIA. In one village, 500 people turned up for their screening. “We decided in 2009 to start this initiative because our films were known outside Iraq but

November-December 2014

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THE TRAVELING CINEMA The Iraqi Independent Film Center’s annual mobile cinema festival draws big crowds in cities and villages, people eager to listen to stories from and by their fellow countrymen.

Below: Scenes from “The Sands of Babylon”, which follows the story of Ibrahim, the missing man from “Son of Babylon”.

the human condition. But delve deeper and there’s more to it. “I try to analyse events and the reactions to them in the context of history.

There can’t be violence without a basis for it, and it’s these underlying factors that I want to expose, so that people can think critically about them and understand whatever unfolds in the future,” he says. Even within Iraq, there is a desperate need for a medium to showcase these untold stories. When conflict is so commonplace that it is ingrained in their daily lives and becomes part of their identity, people tend not to want to talk about it. “They’d rather forget,” he

‘In the psyche of the average Iraqi, everything aside from concerns of immediate survival has been relegated to the bottom of the pile.’ says. But mourning, healing and rebuilding all require an intact memory.

Son of Babylon follows a Kurdish woman and her grandson as they travel to southern Iraq just days after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Unreliable buses, Michael Jackson-loving old men, former Ba’athist soldiers, American GIs, families looking for their husbands, brothers and sons, all aid and hinder the duo in their quest to find Ibrahim, the sole surviving parent of the effervescent young boy and the only son of his sickly grandmother. Hope turns to despair as their search for the man who disappeared more 80

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than a decade ago takes them from prisons to mass graves in a heartbreaking journey, the boy just as eager for a sign of his father as for a glimpse of the famed ruins of Babylon.

Emotions run high both on and off the screen.

“Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Berlin, Sarajevo… No matter where it is screened and how many years have passed, the reaction is the same,” Al Daradji says. And everywhere he is met with the same stunned disbelief when he reveals that neither of his protagonists are professional actors.

The young boy, Yassir Talib, was a serendipitous find who agreed to be part of the film after checking with his dad that it was OK. And Shazada Hussein was a grieving widow whom Al Daradji encountered when he was scouting rural Iraq for stories and locations. “We went to random towns, knocked on strangers’ doors, and they told us about their lives,” he says. “Their stories haven’t been heard for years, and they wanted to talk; they wanted people to be aware of what they had been through; it was their release.” Hussein’s husband had been missing for nearly two decades, but the trauma was raw. The usually stoic lady, who had previously recounted her experiences without shedding a tear, was inconsolable during the filming of the scene at the mass grave (which was incidentally shot very close to an original Ba’athist mass grave). It was fragile, emotional work, and it was only the resolve to see the story told that helped the crew complete the filming. “You see, she wasn’t crying for her fictional son but her real husband, who is one of the one million people who have gone missing in Iraq since 1980.”