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Crash Course: Making Movies on the Rooftops of Baghdad

By Anthony Kaufman

Filmmaking requires perseverance, zeal, sometimes even a pathological commitment to see a project through. Now imagine making movies in Baghdad.

Kidnappings, killings, suicide bombings and blackouts haven't deterred a number of intrepid aspiring directors from pursuing their passion, whether Oday Rasheed and Mohamed Al-Daradji, the first two people to make feature films in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2003 (respectively, Over Exposure and Ahlaam) or the roughly 80 young Iraqis who have gone through Baghdad's Independent Film and Television College since it was launched by two Iraqi exiles in 2004.

Based in London, Kasim Abid and Maysoon Pachachi had taught filmmaking courses to Palestinians in Ramallah and decided to bring that experience to bear in their homeland. "We thought, 'What can we do to help?'" says Pachachi. "We're not doctors, we're not engineers, we're just filmmakers."

And, as in Ramallah, there wasn't much of an infrastructure to build from. For years, "If a camera broke down, you couldn't find spare parts for it," says Pachachi. "There was no film stock, there were no film labs, no digital equipment, so people who had studied at Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts and had done a four-year course in cinema had never touched or even seen a camera. So our focus was completely practical."

Abid and Pachachi set up shop in Baghdad's southeastern district of Al-Wahda, sandwiched between the Tigris River to the West and the Mahdi-Army controlled area of New Baghdad to the East. They set up their first three-month course with around 20 students, but the class lasted up to a year, because students often couldn't get into the school. "Either there's a curfew, or there's skirmishes, or a bomb has gone off and the roads are closed," says Pachachi.

Filmmaking equipment — such as digital videotape stock or lights — can be found in local markets these days. ("The quality is variable," admits Pachachi). But more to the point, "the market where they sell that stuff has been bombed," she warns.

For safety, Abid and Pachachi teach their camera exercises on the roof of the building "amid the satellite dishes," she says. "We're fighting all the time between kicking our students out the door to investigate the world, and on the other hand, being very fearful of their safety. We tell them, 'You have to think of stories that are contained within one location or a place that you're familiar with or that's not dangerous.'"

Even then, it's not always safe. After the February 2006 bombings of the Al-Askrai Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shi'a Islam, escalating sectarian violence spread to Al-Wahda, which "was a quiet mixed area," says Pachachi. In May '06, 13 Iraqis were killed when a bomb exploded in a nearby restaurant; two months later, six bodies were found, all showing signs of torture, according to reports.

Closer to the school, three people were kidnapped from the building where Abid and Pachachi rent offices; bomb blasts shattered nearly every pane of glass in the building; the father of a school graduate, standing across the street, was killed by a random mortar attack; Abid's own brother was killed by militia. And then there's Emad Ali's story.

One of the school's first students, Ali faced a series of heartbreaking setbacks: A mortar attack near his house killed his wife and father, while he spent two weeks in the hospital. Then, after videotaping footage for his short documentary A Candle for the Shabandar Café, an unsentimental elegy for Baghdad's most famous intellectual's café, which was destroyed in a suicide bombing, Ali was attacked by two armed men. After trying to escape, he was shot in the leg and the chest. He survived. His leg, nearly amputated, can be saved with an advanced medical procedure that isn't available in Baghdad.

Among the numerous current dangers, there are fundamentalists who believe the cinema is a sin and will try to stop it, and criminal gangs will steal the equipment. "You're afraid of kidnapping, you're afraid of mugging," says Pachachi — and women, in particular, have faced increasing levels of violence. Several women had to drop out of the course.

And no one trusts anyone with a camera. "The most difficult thing was trying to shoot on the streets, and, often, just in any public location," says Ahmed Jabber, a film student at the college whose short documentary Dr. Nabil, which skillfully and sensitively recounts the struggles of a doctor at an under-equipped hospital, has played at several international film festivals. "If you were carrying a video camera in any public place, you were immediately suspected of being a 'terrorist,' of doing surveillance work for some armed gang," he continues.

In 2004, Mohamed Al-Daradji's production of Ahlaam famously encountered a hostile reaction from two separate groups: he and members of his crew were kidnapped, the sound recordist was shot, and the assailants stole all of their equipment. When they reported the incident, they were thought to be video propagandists working for the insurgency. They were then arrested by U.S. forces and "subjected to psychological torture by the Americans," Al-Daradji has said. A Dutch-Iraqi citizen, who left the country in 1995, he was eventually released with the help of the Dutch embassy.

Despite such horrible circumstances, Al-Daradji is currently back in Iraq, prepping work on his next film, Um-Hussein (Mother of Hussein), which intertwines parallel stories of a mother and son set between the end of the Gulf War in 1991 and the end of Saddam's reign in 2003. He had hoped to fly to Baghdad, but "it wasn't safe," so he's working in the Kurdish city of Erbil to the North.

"I hope the violence will have calmed so I can go directly to Baghdad," he writes via email, "but as you can imagine the uncertainty of the situation is very frustrating. But this is what you are constantly faced when wanting to make a film in Iraq!"

Like many filmmakers working in Iraq today, there is an acknowledgment of the dangers and risks, but a dogged desire "to prove," as Al-Daradji says, "that Iraq is a country that is ready to be rebuilt, through culture and film."

It seems more than a coincidence that a number of the films produced at the Independent Film & Television College focus on cultural subjects (there's one about a film festival, a cultural center and the Shabandar Café). "Those films are a way of asserting that art is important in a time of war — that without culture, there is no civilization, as the man in the film about the Shabandar Café says," says Pachachi. "And I think people feel that to be true. Throughout Iraqi's long history, the country has been invaded, trashed, burnt down and eventually come back to life, and throughout there has always been creative production — painting, sculpture, music and writing. I think in some way, people feel it to be a means of ensuring survival, both personally and on the national level."

Al-Daradji agrees, "As a new generation of artists, writers and filmmakers we should not be stopped by anybody to make this dream a reality."

Unfortunately, all the death and destruction suggests that their dream be put on hold, at least temporarily.

The Independent Film & Television College has since relocated to Damascus, the capital of Syria — joining the 1.5 million displaced Iraqis there. "We had to move," says Pachachi. "The violence was getting so extreme. But we're intending to go back to Baghdad as soon as possible."

To donate equipment or help contribute towards the $10,000 the Independent Film & Television College is trying to raise for Emad Ali's medical care, contact IFTVC via e-mail.

Published on: April 18, 2008