But although Ebrahim Saeedi’s “Mandoo” (Tired) did not win, both he and Daradji showed that independent Iraqi cinema — whose history dates back more than a century yet for years was a propaganda tool of Saddam Hussein’s regime — has made a comeback.k.
“From 2005 to 2008, no films at all were produced in Iraq because of sectarian violence but things are changing,” Daradji, whose film “Son of Babylon” was shot in Iraq and produced in Europe and the Middle East, said.
The critically acclaimed movie follows an old Kurdish peasant woman and her unruly 12-year-old grandson Ahmed in the south of the country three weeks after the fall of Saddam. The pair is searching for Ahmed’s father, who was a soldier in the Iraqi army during the first Gulf War in 1991 and never came home.
The film, which is Iraq’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film in next year’s Oscars, was well-received at a screening in Baghdad in May and has since won a clutch of awards at international film festivals including Berlin, Cairo and Edinburgh.
The US premiere at the Sundance Film Festival was sold out.
“After the screening, 10 American women came up to me and some of them were crying. Their sons were in Iraq. They had never thought that Iraqi mothers could be in the same situation,” Daradji recalled.
Shooting, however, was hard. In all, the film took four years to make and the 32-year-old admitted that the battle against daily violence and attempts at censorship made him question the wisdom of continuing. One scene showing a rickety old bus crossing one of Baghdad’s bridges lasts only a few seconds but took a month to shoot.
“Filming in Baghdad is not easy,” he said, recalling the bus scene as a “nightmare.” “There is no lab to process on site, we had to send everything to UK. Twenty times, I said, ‘Enough, I am leaving’.”
In addition, both the Iraqi government and the authorities in the autonomous Kurdish north asked for changes to be made.
Iraqi officials suggested the grandmother should be an Arab not a Kurd while the Kurds thought her name — Um Ibrahim (mother of Abraham) — was too Arabic, he recalled with a smile.e.
Daradji, who was recently named Middle East Filmmaker of the Year by the US show business trade magazine Variety, refused — and with it, offers of official funding. Now he aims to reopen some of 275 movie theatres destroyed by the war and promote home-grown film-making that was brought to a halt by years of international sanctions and state control.
“Between 2008 and 2010, three to four films a year were produced in Baghdad and in the south of the country (and) roughly one or two in the north,” he said.
“We don’t have a film industry in Iraq, there are no proper theatres... We created an independent film centre in Baghdad and we try to do some education. We have an outdoor cinema, we go around villages and cities to show movies.”
In all, four of his films were shown to packed houses in Thessaloniki, including “Iraq, War, Love, God and Madness,” a documentary showing the difficulties in filming his first feature “Ahlaam” (Dreams) in Baghdad. The international success of Iranian Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi’s “No One Knows about Persian Cats,” which won the special jury prize at Cannes in 2009, has also sparked an interest in cinema among Kurds, said Saeedi.
Two to three feature films are made in the region every year and there are nearly two dozen film-makers, who now have more freedom to explore their own identity and past. “After 2003, after Saddam’s demise, Kurdish people started to express themselves through cinema, to express the sufferings of the past,” Saeedi said. afp
