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Award-winning Iraqi film finally shown in Iraq |
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Four years after filming his searing account of the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi filmmaker Mohammed al-Daradji has finally seen his award-winning movie screened in his homeland.
"Ahlaam" (Dreams) was screened to a select audience in Baghdad before being given three showings last week in Arbil, capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Daradji was in Arbil to mark the occasion.
"I'm very happy that this movie, which covers events on a historical day that will forever remain in the Iraqi memory, is being screened," the director told AFP.
"The movie has participated in so many international festivals and now it has finally come to Iraq," he said, adding that until now the political and security situation in Iraq had been considered too fraught to screen the movie.
"Ahlaam" revolves around the lives of three people in a mental asylum after suffering for years under Saddam's regime.
Ahlaam, a bewildered young woman who witnessed the violent arrest of her beloved on their wedding day and Ali, a former soldier now shell-shocked and traumatised by the American bombings, are patients in the asylum.
Dr Mehdi, a hard working idealist, works at the institution and longs for a free Iraq where humanity is cherished not brutalised by hatred and fear.
The institution is bombed during the 2003 US-led invasion and their lives are thrown into turmoil.
The movie opens with images of American bombs raining down on Baghdad in 2003, interspersed with the terrified faces of the inmates in the mental institution.
The movie tracks the lives of the three in the wake of the bombings, with main focus on Ahlaam. Played by Acil Adel, she escapes the hospital and has to negotiate the dangerous landscape of the newly-invaded capital.
She suffers further brutality when she is raped, first by looters, and then by American soldiers in what is a scarcely concealed allusion to what the director believes is the fate that has befallen Iraq.
Daradji had been living in exile in Europe to avoid persecution from the Baathist regime when the war broke out. In 2003 he returned home to make a film about the plight of ordinary Iraqi people in the aftermath of the invasion.
He shot "Ahlaam" in the streets of Baghdad in extremely difficult conditions, which included curfews and electricity cuts. He and members of his crew were detained at various times both by insurgents and by the US military, neither side believing that they were simply making a film.
His determination paid off. Since he completed the 100-minute feature film in 2004, it has played at international festivals around the world, including in Cairo, Dubai, Carthage, Rotterdam, Munich, Moscow, New York, Seattle and Tokyo, said the director.
It has also been commercially distributed in Spain, the United States and Britain.
The movie has won numerous awards, including the best Arabic film at the Cairo International film festival in 2005, the special jury prize in the Arabe du Monde Cinema in Paris 2006 and the best actor award at Carthage, also in 2006.
The filmmaker said he was disappointed that cinema has come to a near standstill in all of Iraq, except in the Kurdish north, since the US invasion.
Only one cinema hall remains in Baghdad, showing B-grade movies in the afternoons, while most cinema halls across the country have closed their doors.
Falak al-Din Kakayi, minister of culture in the Kurdistan Regional Government, praised the film.
"It records the important moments of the most critical period in the political life in Iraq," he said.
"I hope all Iraqis will see this movie to know where they came from and what they are reaching towards," the minister said.
Daradji, meanwhile, is working on a new project, which he also plans to shoot in Baghdad, despite the fact the streets are even less secure than when he was out with his camera crews in 2003.
Production on "Babel Mourns a New Day" is set to start later this year. For now he is saying little about the project except that it focuses on life in post-invasion Iraq.
In a sign that the situation is anything but normal in Baghdad, leading "Ahlaam" actor Mohammed Hashim was unable to reach Arbil for the screening of the movie.
Fierce fighting between militiamen and US and Iraqi forces in the Sadr City Shiite bastion where he lives, linked with a curfew, prevented him from leaving his home.
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