Reel Festival Edinburgh – Iraq: Song of the Missing Men
Edinburgh is currently hosting the Reel Iraq Festival. Part of the programme are a various number of films, lectures, readings and discussions all dealing with Iraq from different approaches. Today the movie Iraq: Song of the Missing Men, by Iraqi director Layth Abdulamir was shown at the Filmhouse Edinburgh. Among the guests were Iraqi MP Maysoon Al Damluji, young poet and filmmaker Sinan Antoon and the director of the Baghdad National Library Saad Eskander. Also, Abdulamir himself was to hold a brief Question & Answer session after the movie.
Song of the Missing Men was released in 2006 and there has been several reviews published, however, I believe it is important to focus on this movie again, as some of the answers given tonight were in my opinion strong and of high importance.
Abdulamir returned to his country of birth after 27 years of living in Paris, France. According to him, his initial plan was to film a story he had written down. Tensions and the nation’s lack of security made this difficult, though. Instead he then decided to ‘simply’ depict the multiethnicity and mentalities of the Iraqi people in a documentary while travelling from the south up to the kurdish region of Iraq.
I had very little expectations as I had had only heard of the movie briefly. In fact, I avoided reading about it in order not to be biased in any way. And what I saw suprised me – even terrified me.
The director starts off with pictures of the marshland. The deserted area which has been highly damaged by the former dictatorship shockingly breaks the idea of beautiful descriptions heard from people who fled the country decades ago. No palms, no grass, no huts – plain emptiness. And it is then that religious rituals of the marshland inhabitants are thrown onto the screen. On it goes. Extreme pictures dominate the documentary, no break is to come and the mourning pious cries of women and men turn into a violently harsh scream. Abdulamir ends his journey somewhere in the Kurdish north. The sudden quietness of the landscape stands in sharp contrast to the earlier Iraqi clamour.
Co-founder of the modern Iraqi Women’s Movement Maysoon Al Damluji commented, after the movie, that she would have liked to see the intellectuals, young people who shape the country’s future. Abdulamir stated his intention was to give the European audience an insight into the current Iraqi identity. I followed and asked how he perceives Iraqi identity and their attitude towards spirituality and whether anything has changed so far since the movie’s release. Sadly, the given response was anything but what I had hoped for let alone rosy. According to Abdulamir Iraqi identity needs to be refound for that it has been lost in past centuries. He then added, religion does actually play a crucial role in the individual daily grind. My own response leaves me a question mark. If this is Iraqi identity, my optimism has just gone to the dogs. Where is secularism? Where are the intellectual people that once used to define the country. A country that was known to harbour some of the most progressive and controversial thinkers? The few things I memorise from the movie are the sliding pictures of a male dominated society, neglecting woman and man, neglecting all ethnicities, dividing all spirits and the little play that started to build up in my head, hatred. Initially, the movie caused an angry reaction in me. My own stupidity and ignorance left me oblivious to what is really happening in the country my parents had left in the beginning of the nineties; as a consequence I believed Abdulamir was entirely wrong, but obviously it is me who is wrong.
Change must be striven for.
