Daradji: ‘things are changing’

Iraqi cinema scored a notable first at this month’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece, with one film up for an award and a retrospective of the young director Mohamed al-Daradji.

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.

“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 are 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 in the 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.

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.

It shows the daily struggle to film in an occupied city as violence raged after the US invasion in 2003, the young film-maker’s doubts and extraordinary energy in the face of bombings, interrogations and even the arrest of some of his crew.

The inclusion of Kurdish director Saeedi’s “Mandoo” in the official competition in Thessaloniki was a first for Iraqi cinema.

The film depicts a displaced Iranian Kurdish family who want to take their sick father from Iraq to his homeland, Iran, to live out his final days.

The action is shown from the old man’s restricted perspective and takes place mainly in the family’s van, whose windows act as multiple screens showing the brutality and madness of daily life after the fall of Saddam.

Through them are seen the smouldering wrecks of recently exploded car bombs, minefields and screaming sirens.

Saeedi said that he saw a connection between the road movie genre and the Kurdish people, who were “always on the move” and in exile.

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.

Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh

The haj sermon this year – one of the highlights of the three-day pilgrimage that millions of Muslims make to Mecca every year – has received special attention in the media all over the Muslim world. Excerpts from the sermon, which condemns terrorism and extremism and advocates moderation, have been reproduced in hundreds of newspapers. Videos of the sermon with English subtitles are circulating widely by email and have been posted on websites like YouTube. It seems that the Muslim world has embraced the message enthusiastically.

The haj is a transformative experience for most Muslims. The African American civil rights leader Malcolm X abandoned his anti-white views after participating in the haj and had a huge impact on Muslim youth throughout the United States.

This year the haj sermon was given by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh.

During the hour-long sermon, he made the usual call for unity and piety among Muslims, reminding them about the significance of being God-conscious, adhering to monotheism and living a life cognizant of the Day of Judgment. The Grand Mufti also called for environmental protection. He talked about Islamic values which promote security for the ecosystem and mandate frugal and wise use of natural resources.

In addition, part of the sermon was devoted to security issues. The mufti emphasised the necessity of security for the well-being of Muslim communities, and called for the punishment of criminals as well as obedience to rulers, although he did not specify which, as he was vague on political issues.

He spoke about the consequences when human security is absent: the suffering of women and children, chaos and an absence of peace and prosperity. Islam is a religion of mercy and moderation. Spreading violence, hatred and extremism, Sheikh Abdul Aziz said, is against the ethics of Islam. Islam’s goal is to spread peace and security in all its forms, and he called on Muslim communities to uphold the ethics and teachings of Islam.

He then proceeded to talk about the concept of security in Islamic law, saying that security permeates all aspects of life and encompasses economic, social, political, intellectual, media, environmental and spiritual dimensions.

It is while explaining intellectual security that the mufti called on Muslim communities to guard against deviancy, especially extremism and fanaticism. He warned that recent advancements in media and technology have led to the spread of dangerous ideologies and cyber terrorism. He called on Muslim teachers, imams, scholars, think tanks and professors to spread the true message of Islam and combat the spread of extremism.

Not everyone considers the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia an enlightened intellectual. Last year, a child marriage controversy erupted in the country when a judge refused to annul the marriage of an eight-year-old girl to a 47-year-old man. At the time Sheikh Abdul Aziz insisted that ten-year-old girls were ready for marriage and to claim otherwise was being unfair to the girls. A compassionate and prudent statement from him then could have done much for the protection and emancipation of young Muslim girls, and for women everywhere.

However, it is precisely because he comes from the hardcore Wahhabi tradition, which is very strictly traditionalist and not very open to progressive change, that his sermon calling for moderation and condemning violence and terrorism gains tremendous significance. As such, it has the potential to reach those segments of Muslim society that liberal Muslims scholars who have routinely condemned violence cannot influence.

This condemnation of violence and extremism, from the most sacred of Muslim places and during the most sacred of Muslim moments, will hopefully reach the darkest of Muslim places and the most intransigent of Muslim groups. I hope that like Malcolm X, whose extremism was cured by the haj, Muslim youth who are engaged in radical politics too will be inspired by this sermon, and find balance and moderation in their lives.

*Dr. Muqtedar Khan is Associate Professor of Islam and Global Affairs at the University of Delaware and a Fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understating. His website is www.ijtihad.org. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).