Iraqi Films Debut in U.S.

Taking a cue from film festivals in Baghdad and the United Kingdom, Harvard will be hosting Contemporary Iraqi Film, featuring the first American screenings of several award-winning Iraqi short pieces and feature-length films. The festival, which will run April 17-19 at the Center for Government and International Studies, seeks to illustrate the rebirth of the Iraqi film industry, motivated by political issues not often evident to mass audiences. In addition to the movie screenings, the event will feature a traditional Iraqi musical performance and discussion about the modern-day issues raised by the films.

Hassan M.H. Al-Damluji, a British citizen of Iraqi descent and a second-year master’s degree candidate in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department, organized the event with help from his cousin Tamara Jafar ’09. Al-Damluji hopes the festival will help create greater awareness of Iraqi culture and society in America. The festival, he says, will “really celebrate Iraqi culture and give the spotlight to Iraq as a cultural producer.”

Since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country has seen a small-scale revival of its once-thriving movie industry. This revitalization culminated in several film festivals, including the First International Short Film Festival in Baghdad in 2005. The Harvard event will be the American premiere of the Baghdad festival’s joint winners of the Best Documentary Award. “Damned Gum,” directed by Ammar Saad, tells the story of a young journalist whose perspective changes after his partner is killed, while “The Office of Security,” directed by Hadi Mahood, centers on the suffering of Iraqi people even after the end of Saddam Hussein’s torturous reign.

The Harvard event will also feature a third film from the Baghdad festival. “Film About Cilema,” whose title is a reference to the fact that many Iraqis mispronounce “cinema” as “cilema,” is directed by Uday Salah. The movie documents the Iraqi film industry as seen through the eyes of two young filmmakers.

Even though the Iraqi film industry lacks the money for elaborate movie sets in order to make feature films, the continuing violent conflict provides a wealth of material for filmmakers to utilize. “You just need to turn on the camera and start rolling,” Al-Damluji says. “[These movies] have varying levels of production, but all of them are fascinating in that they open a window into...the living, breathing film set that is Iraq right now.”

The festival’s opening film will be “About Baghdad,” which was directed by a team of filmmakers led by Sinan Antoon, a professor at The Gallatin School of New York University who received his doctorate is Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard in 2006. Antoon will also be the festival’s keynote speaker, introducing each film before screenings.

“About Baghdad” was filmed in Baghdad in 2003, immediately after the initial wave of major combat operations had ended. The film collects many personal accounts of life in Iraq, highlighting the effects of past and present intervention by the United States. Since its release, “About Baghdad” has been featured as an official selection at many film festivals around the world.

Antoon hopes his documentary will fill a void that he perceives in most recent films about the conflict in Iraq. “There are more than 60 documentaries about Iraq in this country and only four or five of them are about the Iraqis themselves, the primary victims of this war,” Antoon writes in an email. “This is where our film is unique in directly representing Iraqis as opposed to others.”

In addition to focusing on the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the film features personal accounts of the Iraq-Iran War and the hardships faced during the American-led sanctions of 1991-2003, which Antoon refers to as “genocidal.”

Overall, Al-Damluji and Antoon both hope that Contemporary Iraqi Film will serve as a platform to present issues not normally addressed by the mainstream American media. “After five years of war and hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, Americans know very little about Iraq and Iraqis beyond the depressingly simplistic,” Antoon says. “It’s high time for that to change.”

—Staff writer Jeff W. Feldman can be reached at jfeldman@fas.harvard.edu.