Al-Nakba (Qatar/Palestine 2008)

This is a documentary film about ‘the catastrophe’ that befell the Palestinian people in 1948. It traces the history of the colonial policies and actions that led to their expulsion from their homeland. It was made by Palestinian filmmaker and journalist Rawan Damen in 2008 and transmitted on the Al Jazeera Arabic network. Now an English-Language version is being transmitted on their English Television network [Freeview 83 in the UK, with other language versions also available]. It runs for 200 minutes and is going out in four parts. Two episodes have already been transmitted but are being repeated.

Rawan Damen’s film is a fairly conventional television documentary using ‘talking heads’ and film and photographs. Much of the material and comment has been available in academic and historical publication. But now it is being presented in a fairly popular medium and it has the advantage of using visual material, which brings an increased power to the story.

The film starts with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, a key event that was analysed by the Palestinian writer Edward Said in his great work Orientalism. The first two episodes address the British occupation and Mandate of Palestine following the First World War. In was in that conflict that the new Zionist Movement achieved its coup of the Balfour Declaration – the British support for a Jewish State was seen as a way of ensuring the British presence and it’s interests across the Middle East.

It is difficult to decide which was more objectionable: the British colonial manipulation of a people and its lands, or the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of the Zionist in pursuit of a ‘Greater Israel’. Certainly the policies and practices of each have much in common. The British Mandate saw the use of house arrests and executions, concentration camps, house demolitions, the exiling of leaders and the harassment and dissolution of Palestinian institutions. Just as British laws from the Mandate still serve the Zionist State, so do the brutal methods pioneered by the British.

Episode two focuses on the Palestinian resistance and revolution from 1936 to 1939. This is a part of the tale which gives lie to Zionist clams of  ’a land without people’; and claims that a Palestinian nation did not exist. It also highlights the weakness and limitations of the Palestinian and Arab official leaders. Their failings were to be an important aid to the Zionist take-over in 1948. The other was the development of the Zionist military forces, which were happy to use actions now loudly condemned as ‘terrorism’ by Israel.

Rawan Damen has added an impressive range of commentators, including both Palestinian and Israeli historians, and ordinary Palestinians including refugees from Al-Nakba. This and the impressive array of actual film from the period really create its effect. There has been excellent research to retrieve film that has not been seen for a long time, including material in the British Archives.

This is both an important documentary film and contribution to the struggles of the Palestinian people. Fortunately Al Jazeera tend to repeat their programme several times. So it will be possible to catch up with episodes one and two if you missed them. Episode three will take us to the key year of 1948. Definitely tune into Al Jazeera -  the channel is worth watching for a different slant on the news.

[Note that their transmission times are given in GMT not in British Summer Time],

Five Broken Cameras (Palestine/Israel/France/Netherlands 2012)

The ‘no-man’s land’ where the olive trees were. The black objects on the ground, shaped like light-bulbs, are Israeli tear gas cartridges.

Five Broken Cameras is an engaging and well-made documentary. It’s affective in making us feel the emotions of the filmmaker who was compelled to complete it and it deserves the praise it has received and the audience interest it has attracted. The events it portrays are shocking and in a civilised world they would be one of the catalysts for change. But we don’t live in a civilised world and as yet there seems little sign that enough people in a position to change things have the courage to carry out changes.

Five Broken Cameras is a certain kind of documentary and that may also be part of the problem – though it shouldn’t necessarily be so. I’ll try to explain what I mean. The cameras of the title were each used by a Palestinian farmer to document the theft of his land by Israeli settlers illegally occupying territory in the West Bank to the west of Ramallah from 2005 onwards. The film doesn’t attempt to fill in all the history or to run through all the questions surrounding the Occupation of Palestine and the building of settlements which contravene international law as well as being (as in this case) illegal under Israeli law. Instead, it appeals directly to the viewer in terms of the obvious suffering of the Palestinians when they try to resist the bulldozers which uproot their olive trees and the Israeli soldiers and police who attack them with tear gas, arrest them and occasionally kill them during attempts to squash their protests.

Emad Burnat, the farmer at the centre of the film and the co-director (as well as the principal cinematographer, using the five cameras) was himself wounded and arrested and recorded the arrest of each of his brothers and the death of one of his comrades in the village during their protests. The co-director, writer and co-editor of the film is Guy Davidi, an Israeli filmmaker who trained partly in Paris and who lived in the Palestinian village of Bil’in for three months in 2005 when Emad began filming. But just as the film doesn’t elaborate on the history and politics of the situation, it also doesn’t explain/explore the Israeli support for the village protests – i.e. the Israeli activists who fight against the Occupation. They are shown and occasionally referenced but not in any detail. The same goes for the international supporters who travelled out to the West Bank to show solidarity. I’m not suggesting that there is anything sinister in this, but that it adds to the overall feeling that this is a very ‘personal’ film about a man and five cameras (each of which is damaged during the filming or deliberately smashed by Israeli soldiers). I suspect that this ‘personal’ approach has helped the film reach a wider audience, especially in North America, and it has been nominated for ‘Best Documentary Feature’ at the 2013 Oscars. What is slightly sinister is the film’s depiction of the settlers – Orthodox Jews who are perhaps the least ‘humanised’ by the camera’s gaze. The Israeli settlers seen here trouble me deeply – I can’t think of anything about them that would attract my sympathy – but I don’t want to feel that way about anybody and I wonder if the filmmakers’ decision not to invite them to speak or not to attempt to present their perspective, somehow damages the strength of the film’s polemic. I’m not asking for ‘balance’ – the settlers are in the wrong, that’s the starting point. But we’ve got to try to treat them like human beings, otherwise they are trapped behind their fences in the same way that they have deliberately put the Palestinians behind a fence/wall.

Emad states at the beginning of the film that he is a ‘fella’ – a peasant attached to his land. The rough land which supports only olive trees and a few sheep/goats has been the property of the families in the village since before anyone can remember. The sight of bulldozers digging up the trees or the sheer vandalism of setting the trees on fire, even before the barbed wire has staked out the land grab by the settlers, is contrasted with the almost comical tree-hugging of one of the villagers. This is one of the most affecting shots in the film. The destruction of Palestinian olive groves is perhaps the most powerful symbol of the Occupation alongside the Dividing Wall.

The one absolute plus of the film is that it celebrates the resistance over five years of the whole community in Bil’in. I’m sure that’s what stayed with the sizeable audience in the cinema. I hope the film wins the Oscar, if only because that will help more people to see the film. The more exposure that these stories get, the more chance we have of putting pressure on the Israeli government. There is one scene in the film in which we watch someone from the Israeli security forces deliberately shoot a protestor in the leg from only a few yards away. I wonder if the offender was brought to justice?

LFF 2012 #3: El taaib (The Repentant/Le repenti, Algeria-France 2012)

Rachid meets his father in his home village after deciding to ‘repent’

By the time of my third film of the day, I was very tired and this was a demanding film in the circumstances. This interesting review from Cine-Vue suggests that the film was well-chosen as part of the ‘Debate’ strand of the festival (a slide on-screen announces this after you’ve sat through the rather tedious festival filmed introduction sequence of a young woman watching films and stuffing herself with popcorn). I’m not sure that simply giving us ‘Debate’ – almost as a command – works for me, but having an Algerian filmmaker or critic present to introduce the film would have been good. LFF is actually quite good at this kind of thing.

Merzak Allouache is a veteran Algerian director (born in 1944) and I remember with pleasure his 1996 film Salut Cousin! about a North African visitor’s sometimes comic adventures in Paris while staying with his cousin. This new film is very different. A statement during the credits tells us that a ‘Repentant’ is the official term used by the Algerian authorities for ex-soldiers from the Islamist guerrilla groups who fought in the Algerian Civil War and who were prepared to come down from the mountains and forests, hand in their weapons and report to the police before resuming ‘normal’ life. One such is Rachid, whose appearance at the beginning of the film in his parent’s village creates a local stir with some villagers attacking him as the only available possible murderer of their family members. I didn’t pick up the precise time period for the action in the film but historically the story would fit in the period around 1999-2000 following the passing of legislation about ‘civil concord’.

Rachid reports to the police in the neighbouring town. He is offered a job in a café-bar arranged via the police and expected to start naming names. But when he discovers the identity of the local pharmacist, he feels compelled to act without telling the police. I won’t spoil the narrative. Suffice to say, we don’t know at first why the pharmacist is so important or where the story is going to go. Narrative information is given to us sparingly and there is a palpable sense of unease. The film is quite short (87 mins) and it ends rather abruptly. I think I agree with the Cine-Vue reviewer that some of the characters such as the (very reluctant) café owner and the local police chief who set up Rachid in his new identity need more time on screen.

The Algerian Civil War was brutal in many ways and it clearly isn’t ‘over’ yet. I think it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t succumb to over-optimistic outcomes. When I reflected on the narrative afterwards I thought this was a restrained and powerful little story. Having said that, I’m not sure what there is to debate. It’s a neglected war in terms of histories and contemporary media coverage, especially in the UK and it shouldn’t be – especially given recent events in the rest of the Maghreb and elsewhere in the Arab world. The film doesn’t take sides or explain why the characters behave as they do, it just shows us some of the terrible consequences of civil war. Allouache himself says that he wanted to “question the amnesia” about the war in Algeria itself. He lives in France and made the film on location in just 20 days with little co-operation (but no banning restriction) from the Algerian cultural authorities. (See his statements in this Euromed Audio-Visual report – including some interesting comments about film culture in Algeria.)

The film was another to be screened in Cannes in Directors Fortnight and it was given a prize by Europa Cinema distributors. I hope it does get a wide release but I think, unfortunately, that it will be a hard sell in the international market. All the more reason then to be grateful to the LFF for bringing it over.

Another new Palestinian cinema

Great news, Palestinians in East Jerusalem now have the opportunity to go to the cinema again. The old al-Quds cinema, which was closed down a quarter of a century ago during the first intifada from 1987-1993 has re-opened as the Yabous Cultural Centre which includes a cinema. The opening programme included a ‘Freedoms Film Week’. Read the whole story here. And visit the ‘Electronic Intifada’ report here. The new 81-seat cinema is programmed by Rima Essa who has made some strong statements about trying to show Arab films as well as other international titles previously only available in cinemas in West Jerusalem at high prices for Palestinians.

I’m sorry we are a few weeks late reporting this one but it’s great to add a third cinema opening after those in Nablus and Jenin.

Films From the South #2: Man Without a Cellphone (Bidoun Mobile, Palestine/Israel/Fra/Bel/Qatar 2010)

Jawdat (Razi Shawahdeh) uses his phone in the field by the mast as his father Salem (Basem Loulou) looks on.

This witty and sharp little film (only 78 mins) is one of several recent productions from Arab filmmakers that defy easy categorisation in institutional terms. Director Sameh Zoabi was born in a village close to Nazareth in 1975 and took a joint English and Film degree at Tel Aviv before completing a Masters in Film Direction at Columbia University in New York. This is his first feature after critical acclaim for his 2005 short film Be Quiet at Cannes. Supported by two Israeli Film Council backed funding bodies plus French and Belgian funding as well as support from Sundance and the Doha Film Institute, Man Without Cellphone pokes at the sore issue of Palestinian identity within Israel’s declared borders – Palestinian land first occupied after 1948, rather than in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

In a personal statement on the Memento Films website, Sameh Zoabi tells us:

Growing up, our own communities and schools are not integrated into the larger Israeli society. After high school, many young people flock to universities and the work place where they must interact with the larger Jewish-Israeli population for the first time. Leaving home is a major transition and time of self-discovery for young adults across all cultures, but it is particularly unique to Palestinian-Israelis, who come to realize their status as second class citizens with full force. In the media, the struggle for equal rights is overshadowed by the larger political milieu of the region, and is lacking in personal stories of everyday people.

In finding a way to explore these ‘personal stories’, Zoabi hits on a number of ideas that have also turned up in two other productions from the region, the Israeli film The Lemon Tree and the Palestinian film Rana’s Wedding. In this case it is not a Palestinian lemon orchard but an olive grove that sits next to an Israeli development. The new development is a mobile phone mast which improves the reception of the villagers (both Arab and Jewish communities) but angers the older farmers including Salem who owns the olives and believes the mast is sending out radiation to give the Arab villagers cancer and to ruin the olive crop. But his 20 year-old son Jawdat enjoys the new reception and is more interested in dating girls – Muslim or Christian Arabs, or even Jewish or Russian. The twist is that Jawdat has no real future because he keeps failing the Hebrew entrance test for university – unlike his sister who is already there. The plot requires Jawdat to be reconciled with his father in order to galvanise the community fight to have the phone tower removed and this is achieved (i.e. Jawdat does help) by that standby of Palestinian films, the need to get permission to cross into the West Bank (thus the link to Rana’s Wedding, a serio-comic film narrative about organising movement between Jerusalem and Ramallah). I won’t spoil the narrative pleasure of Man Without a Cellphone any more, suffice to say that the narrative device works well. I should also note that the interaction of the men and women (old and young) in the village is treated in ways similar to that in the Nadine Labaki film we saw yesterday.

I enjoyed the film very much. There are plenty of laughs and Jawdat and his friend Muhammad are very likeable characters. But the dig at both generational conflicts within the Palestinian communities and the unjust treatment of Arabs in Israel is clear throughout. I hope the film gets widely seen. My only concern is the length. ‘Short’ features like this often fail to get distribution or are shunned by audiences. I felt that some elements of the narrative could have been extended – but perhaps budget constraints were the problem.

Go here to see the ‘pitch preview’ of the film on the website of the Doha Film Institute.

Films From the South #1: Where Do We Go Now? (Lebanon/Fr/It/Egypt 2011)

In one of the more surreal moments in 'Where Do We Go Now?', three of the nightclub dancers sit by two of the village women who have engineered their arrival.

The Films From the South Festival opened strongly tonight with a real crowd-pleaser. Heidi Sandberg and Lasse Skagen, the festival’s Managing Director and Artistic Director respectively, opened the ten days of screenings and introduced Nadine Labaki, the director, co-writer and star of Where Do We Go Now? As the final credits rolled Ms Labaki received a deserved standing ovation for a film that will no doubt attract healthy audiences across the world following a highly successful opening in France and Lebanon.

The film’s title is taken from its last line of dialogue. I won’t spoil your enjoyment by explaining it, but in case you might think that a parting shot like this makes the film sound despairing, I hope you will be assured that it’s actually the opposite and filled with hope – while recognising that the problem hasn’t been solved yet.

I’ve been mulling over the various genre descriptions of the film such as ‘musical comedy’ and the inimitable Variety ‘dramedy’. I was surprised that there is a moment of real tragedy in the film. This definitely changes the overall tone of the film, sharpening up the comedy and adding to the real satirical edge which is there in the film underneath all the music and laughter. Where Do We Go Now? is clearly a follow-up to Labaki’s earlier Caramel, but also something ‘bigger’ in cinematic terms. Its use of music helps to propel it away from the more realist tone of the earlier film and towards something more fantastical.

Although most reports set the film in Lebanon, there aren’t any direct references to that country. It could really be set in any relatively isolated community. In this case the village is in the mountains, linked only to civilisation by a narrow track that is heavily mined on either side. The two teenage sons of the shopkeeper take their ‘scooter and trailer’ down the mountain each day to collect supplies. Meanwhile the women visit the village’s twin cemeteries, Christian and Muslim, replacing the flowers on the graves of husbands and sons lost in a civil war between sectarian groups. When the boys set up a new aerial on the hillside it brings both music radio and television channels to the village which gathers to usher in the millennium. But television also seems to bring seeds of discord, partly through the news of what is happening elsewhere in the country and partly through the sexualised imagery which inflames the passions of the men of all ages. Perhaps fittingly, the village women will eventually use sexual allure (in the form of a group of Ukrainian nightclub dancers) as a decoy device in order to prevent the men from reaching the inevitable conclusion of an outbreak of the civil war directly in the village itself – and that’s where the comedy comes in.

In a press interview (see below), Nadine Labaki says that she wanted the film to represent something that could happen in any village threatened by civil conflict of any sort, not just religious. But she does say that she was prompted to make the film when in May 2008, on the day she discovered that she was pregnant, Beirut once again moved into civil war mode:

“And I said to myself, if I had a son, what would I do to prevent him from picking up a gun and going out into the street? How far would I go to stop my child from going to see what’s happening outside and thinking he had to defend his building, his family or his beliefs? The idea for the film grew out of that.”

There are two main differences between this film and Caramel as I see it. The first is the scale of production. With more co-production partners, including support from both Canal + and the Doha Film Institute as well as Pathé (the international sales agents who will also distribute in much of Europe), the film was genuinely international and the budget was forecast as $6.7 million (Variety November 2010). I suspect that is quite large by Lebanese standards. I’m not sure if it was significant in attracting cinematographer Christophe Offenstein (who lensed the two Guillaume Canet Fims, Tell No One and Little White Lies). He certainly makes good use of the CinemaScope frame in the opening musical sequence and creates plenty of excitement in the composite village scenes (which were shot in three different Lebanese villages, one of which has its church and mosque close together). Despite the bigger budget, Labaki decided to stick with her original decision to use non-actors in most roles. I was sure that I’d seen some of the actors before but I was wrong. That’s a tribute I think to Labaki’s skill in moulding the performances of a large cast of non-professionals into such a wonderful ensemble.

The second difference is the injection of what Labaki calls “a mood of fairytale and fable” – via the use of music. I’d like to tell you that she drew on Indian popular cinema or Egyptian melodramas but she told her Cannes interviewer that it was Grease and the Disney animations Snow White and Cinderella that originally inspired her. The music is written by Labaki’s partner Khaled Mouzanar and the writing process is quite an organic part of writing the film. The words are by Tania Saleh and I’d like to listen to the songs again. I do think that the film feels oddly ‘universal’ and I thought of lots of other similar narratives from Greek tragedies and fairy tales to one of my favourite Cuban films, The Waiting List (2000) about a community of travellers trapped in a country bus station who create a kind of utopia. In Nadine Labaki’s film her isolated community in a sense create a fantasy about a world in which people work to avoid wars and to live with difference – now that is a political idea, isn’t it?

Download the Cannes Press Pack (pdf) here.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make the Q&A or the Press Conference given by Nadine Labaki in Oslo, but I hope to have more luck with the next festival guest, Eric Khoo from Singapore, whose films I’m seeing tomorrow.

Cineuropa ran a piece today on this festival, pointing out that there is a new initiative from Films From the South and the Norwegian Film Institute to set up a ‘South Fund’ encouraging co-productions between filmmakers from the South and Norwegian partners. The Norwegian government has pledged €1.3 million over 5 years and 13 potential projects have been selected for a forum to be held during this festival.

Films From the South Festival 2011

Oslo’s unique film festival celebrating films from Africa, Asia and Latin America opens on Thursday October 6 and we’ll be there to cover the first five days. The festival programme presents nearly 100 films organised in sections: ‘Main Competition’, New Horizons, Doc South, Asian Visions, Latin American Style, African Stories and Middle East Without Borders. The ‘Critical Room’ gives an opportunity to meet some of the directors featured in the documentary strand, focusing on Brazil and Afghanistan, and there are four directors given a showcase within the overall programme: Asghar Farhadi (Iran), Eric Khoo (Singapore), Matias Bize (Chile) and Fernando Pérez (Cuba). There is also a children’s section (this year exclusively animation) and an associated film education programme (dealing with films about Afghanistan) that takes film screenings beyond Oslo and into other areas of Norway. With associated art and music events, Oslo looks like a buzzing place over the next couple of weeks – can’t wait!

The women of a village threatened by war in Where Do We Go Now?

The opening film is Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? in which the Lebanese director offers a comedy-drama about how women can prevent men from going to war. Ms Labaki is the main guest of the festival and will present her film in person. This is perfectly timed as, after winning the audience prize at Toronto, Where Do We Go Now? has just opened as the biggest Arabic language film in Lebanese box office history. Following her earlier international hit Caramel, Where Do We Go Now? reinforces the emergence of a new kind of female identity in a region galvanised by the ‘Arab Spring’ – something picked up elsewhere in the festival with recent films from Egypt and Morocco. Watch this space for our verdict on Where Do We Go Now?

Festival website: http://www.filmfrasor.no/en/index.html

Son of Babylon (Iraq/UK/Fra/NL/Palestine/UAE/Egypt 2009)

The gateway to Baghdad

I’ve been trying for some time to catch this film which was produced out of Yorkshire with partners in several other countries. I was lucky to find it showing as part of the Hebden Bridge Arts Festival in July and with an accompanying Q&A with director Mohamed Al Daradji and producer Isabelle Stead. The only drawback was that distributors Dogwoof  had sent a DVD instead of a 35mm print to the 500 seat Hebden Bridge Picturehouse. The result was that a film shot on 35mm looked dark and pixellated on the big screen. Following a similar experience with Dogwoof’s Amreeka, I’m getting a bit cross with this practice. However, the usual healthy Hebden Bridge audience didn’t seem to have too many problems with the film and I didn’t have the heart to ask the director what he thought of the crappy image on screen after months spent carefully filming in Iraq. (Ironically, his company hires out their 35mm camera equipment to make much needed revenue.)

Mohamed Al Daradji was, as he told us, born in a poor part of Baghdad. He trained as a filmmaker in Hilversum in the Netherlands and in Leeds where he later founded Human Film (which also has a presence in the Netherlands and in Iraq). He was actually making his first film Ahlaam (Dreams) (2006) in Baghdad when he had the idea for Son of Babylon. The film has a very simple story. 12 year-old Ahmed travels with his grandmother, south from the Kurdish area of Northern Iraq to Baghdad in 2003 in search of his father Ibrahim who has been missing since the Gulf War in 1991. From Baghdad they travel on to a prison and then further south to check the mass graves that are being opened in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Al Daradji, in a Q&A downloadable from the Human Film website, has spoken about the influence of both Rossellini and Italian neo-realism in the late 1940s as well as more recent Iranian Cinema on his work in Iraq. I was certainly struck by the Rossellini comparisons and by the similarities between the Baghdad street scenes and images of Afghanistan in the work of the Makhmalbafs. Following the neo-realist approach, Al Daradji searched for non-actors for all the roles in the film. He filmed on location in six different Iraqi cities and took his story from ‘contemporary life’ or “from the world” as Rossellini suggested. The whole process was extremely difficult, not least because of the problems in getting footage sent back to the West for processing. Not surprisingly, Al Daradji says that he formed a close bond with his actors, especially the young boy whom he has since ‘mentored’.

The neo-realist approach has also caused other problems. The film’s ending is bleak – just like the prospects for many Iraqis. There is no attempt to fictionalise the ending by hinting at an optimistic future for the boy. Instead, the narrative effectively ends with the facts about the numbers of ‘missing’ in Iraq. This includes not only the 1 million and more lost in the three wars since 1980 but also the more than 150,000 since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The filmmakers have set up a campaign group with a UK base and charitable status: Iraq’s Missing Campaign. They have also started a petition which you can sign online. The website suggests many other ways to help – including help in promoting the film and I’m certainly willing to do that (but please persuade Dogwoof to get their act together!). Either of the two websites above will lead you to information on the film and the campaign.

I found the film gripping but painful to watch. The poor quality of the image in this particular screening means that I can’t comment on whether a more ‘beautiful’ image would have an effect on how an audience responds. The lack of a ‘happy ending’ is not a concern of course but there are always going to be questions about how to handle the emotional response that films like this generate. The filmmakers have attempted to channel that emotion into support for their campaign and that seems the right thing to do.

I have no direct knowledge of Iraq and therefore took what was offered at face value. However, after the screening I met a friend who was in Baghdad in 2003 (in a humanitarian aid capacity, I think). She pointed out that the street scenes shot in 2008 did not really represent how Baghdad looked in 2003 – in particular, the women in 2003 were dressed in much brighter clothing and were not routinely ‘covered’ to the same extent. If this is true it does undermine some aspects of the presentation. My friend also commented on the Kurdish elements of the story, suggesting that there were problems in giving the audience information about Kurdish culture in an artificial way in the dialogue. I don’t think that there is much that could be done about this – the audience for the film in the West would probably be lost without some explanation of Kurdish history. However, it does raise an interesting question about any assumptions we might have about Iraqi culture and the position of a distinctive separate community within the country. Al Daradji himself is an ‘outsider’ in terms of the Kurdish community and his discussions with his actors involved considerable amounts of translation. Of course, it would be good to know what the Kurds in Iraq thought about the film. Al Daradji was able to tell us about the screenings he held in the country (which now is without functioning cinemas as such) and unsurprisingly they were very well received. You can read about the screening in Baghdad in a Guardian interview and the film has I think now been shown in other parts of Iraq using mobile cinema kit.

A DVD release accompanied the film into UK cinemas and I’d urge you to rent or buy the DVD (or watch it online) and support the campaign.

Production Notes and more on the film from Dogwoof.

Cinema has an important role to play in telling stories like these from a personal perspective. Al Daradji has said that he feels that his film offers a distinctively alternative view of Iraq to those of the US/UK broadcast media.

The official trailer for the film: