We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War

18. A Film-Training Project for Young Iraqis

205 18 A Film-Training Project for Young Iraqis Maysoon Pachachi By 1991, Iraqis had been talking about the abuses of Saddam’s regime for 20 years, and many were living in exile—in neighboring Arab countries, in Iran, and in Europe. People gave their depositions and affidavits to Amnesty, they tried to heal their traumas and create new lives; they had a million stories to tell, but it seemed that no one wanted to hear them. And so, they fell silent, harboring an incommunicable grief and sense of violent dislocation. But then suddenly, it seemed as if the whole world was talking about Saddam. From soon after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, articles began appearing in the Western press about “the butcher of Baghdad ,” about Saddam’s human rights abuses, about the chemical weapons , the prisons, the torture. And it felt very strange and unreal. What the reports said was, generally speaking, true, but what was happening seemed to me dishonest. I felt very strongly what so many Iraqis had suffered was being used to justify a shift in Western policy, but the real lived experience of the people, in all its complexity, was somehow absent from the whole account. The Iraqi people, themselves, were invisible. It was as if the whole country, with its long and complicated history, its rich mix of ethnicities and religions, was reduced to just one man, Saddam Hussein—and he was “bad.” The 1991 Gulf War was a turning point for many Iraqis in exile. Most of us—sitting in London, Stockholm, Tehran, or Damascus—if we were being realistic, didn’t think we’d ever go “home” to live in Iraq again, but the country, its history, its colors, its accents, nevertheless, 206  Maysoon Pachachi held a critical part of our identity and defined in part who we were and how our life had played out. Now it seemed it was being erased off the face of the earth. Night after night, we sat in front of TV screens, transfixed by the fire and smoke of bombs and the green tracery of antiaircraft fire in Baghdad’s skies. In all the thousands of hours of media coverage, we very rarely saw an ordinary Iraqi person speak— and if we did, it was usually 10 seconds of someone shouting hysterically into a microphone thrust in front of his or her face. Who were the people on whom all this firepower was being unleashed? They were never shown. Mostly you saw only the “firework display” and the black-and-white video game images of a “smart bomb” finding its target—shot from a plane kilometers overhead. The destroyed bridges were often the most painful; perhaps because they were emblematic of the way, in which the country was being shredded, ripped apart. My response was to make a film about Iraqi women in exile—a kind of modern history of the country through the experiences of the women I interviewed. I talked to as broad a cross-section as I could find. As I worked on the film, I began to realize that, in some way, I was trying to remake, or to make whole again, what had been unmade and fragmented and to make a space for the lives that had been so absent in all the accounts of the war. At the time, making this documentary was the only way I, as a filmmaker, had of getting beyond the shock, grief, loss, and sense of powerlessness that was the result of all the destruction I had watched. Soon after finishing my film I went to teach young Palestinian filmmakers from different cities and camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Journalist Daoud Kuttab and film producer George Khleifi had traveled all over Palestine collecting their students, convincing the Israeli authorities to issue permits and parents that studying film was a worthwhile thing for their children to do, and, of course, they had to talk them into letting their girls leave home to live and study in Jerusalem for the duration of the course. It hadn’t been easy. It was the first of about five courses in Palestine in which my friend Kasim Abid, a London-based Iraqi filmmaker like myself, and I taught over the next eight years. Some of the students were there just to have a A Film-Training Project for Young Iraqis...