On 2 December, the Ruya Foundation co-sponsored the Iraqi premiere of the award-winning documentary film Iraqi Odyssey (2014). The film traces the epic journey of the filmmaker Samir’s own family who left Iraq more than half a century ago, and are now scattered across the world. Samir (b.1955, Iraq) is a Swiss-Iraqi film director, writer and producer. Of his major documentary films, Babylon 2 (1993) documented the rise of electronic music and urban culture among Zurich’s second generation immigrants, while Forget Baghdad (2002) told the story of Iraqi Jews living in exile. He speaks to Ruya about the making of Iraqi Odyssey, and his upcoming feature film Baghdad in My Shadow.
You have been a filmmaker for over thirty years. In that time, there have been several waves of migration out of Iraq. Why did you decide to make a film about the Iraqi diaspora and your family now, in recent years?
I started working on Iraqi Odyssey long before its release in 2014. It was a long term project that took over ten years. The idea came to me in 2003, after my last documentary film Forget Baghdad (2002) about the Jewish Communists of Iraq who were now living in Israel. I was questioning what Arab identity meant, was it linked to a religion, Islam? Or was it a culture, a language, and a set of traditions that everyone living in the Arab world had adopted? While I was making the film, I became desperate. I thought: ’Why am I making a film about the Iraqi Jews, instead of one about my aunts and uncles who are from the same generation.’ Like the Iraqi Jewish community, my family was also spread all over the world. Our experience as part of Iraq’s diaspora was the same as theirs.
What were the challenges of telling the story of your family?
The biggest challenge was to convince members of my family that they should be a part of the film. Iraqis and Arabs are not used to seeing themselves in front of the camera. My family were all politically active in their youth. They didn’t want to seem like they were washing their dirty laundry in public. I had to make them understand that I respected their wishes, but that I was also going to ask them serious details about their lives. I wouldn’t say they were shy, but they were distant. Some of them were afraid. They were not sure if I would really give them a platform of sincerity to tell their story and the history of the world that we came from. The work I was doing divided my family at times, but in the end it brought us closer together.
What was the most striking discovery you made about a member of your family when you were making the film?
I was most astonished to learn that my grandfather had adopted his liberal worldview through his Islamic studies at the hawza, the religious seminary in Najaf. He was not reacting to his religious education, but embracing it. In the 1920s, many men of his generation, the Shi’as of Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, came to study in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and they became more liberal as a result of their studies. Interestingly there was a strong Communist network. They respected different religions and schools of thought, they believed in social justice and the equality of men and women. My grandfather did not interfere with the career choices or the love lives of his sons and daughters.
To film Iraqi Odyssey, you returned to Iraq for the first time since the early 1990s. What had changed in your opinion?
The lack of civil society is a huge problem that I have noticed in Iraq. As you will see in my film, there was once a vision for a modern society in Baghdad. Ideas circulated about the creation of public services, a welfare system and checks and balances to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. This vision persisted despite Saddam’s dictatorship and until the end of the Iran-Iraq war, but it was lost during the embargo. Today, when I see a person in Baghdad cleaning up the streets, I’m so touched that someone is doing something for the public, when the resources are so scarce and levels of corruption are so high. All the beautiful parks and gardens have gone, and the city is probably 10 degrees hotter than before.
Iraqi Odyssey deals with historical events and movements, such as the conflict between the Ba’ath and Communist parties, and most recently the invasion of 2003, that divide Iraqis to this day. In the absence of a history that is collectively agreed on, how do you as a filmmaker attempt to maintain objectivity?
I don’t believe that it is possible to be objective in a creative process like filmmaking. This is why I also show the process of making the documentary during the film, and I am present as the director in the film. I am presenting my manipulation to the viewer.
How did audiences react to the film during the Iraqi premiere in Baghdad? Were there any particularly difficult or interesting questions from the audience?
People were very emotional during the film, and some members of the audience cried. I was surprised to see that young Iraqis know very little about Iraq’s history. This is a younger generation born during the Iran-Iraq war and the 1990s. They think that Iraq has always been a shattered and religiously rigid state.
In Babylon 2 (1993) you documented the rise of urban culture among second generation immigrants in Switzerland, a theme which you revisit in later films. What draws you to urban culture, and rap music in particular, as a way of telling stories about exile and migration?
Babylon 2 documented the lives of second generation immigrants in Switzerland, who were using digital techniques like sampling, to create a new kind of music. It was a personal film, I was talking about myself and the people surrounding me. I grew up with the two rebellions of pop culture in my youth. First, there was white pop music, which was heavily commercialised by the end of the 1970s. Then rap came on the scene as a form of counter culture. I was struck by rap’s emphasis on words to make music, and its relationship to rebellion. This could be because words were important in my family; my aunts and uncles loved poetry. Then I discovered that these artists were using new digital facilities, like drum machines and sample, while we filmmakers were shifting from analogue to digital. I knew that something special was going on, and I was attracted to it.
Your new film, Baghdad In My Shadow, is set around an Iraqi cafe in London. Why did you choose this city, given that there are also big Iraqi communities in Sweden and Germany?
Even though Britain prefers to avoid talking about its colonial history, there are still some very strong ties between England and Iraq. London is in my mind an Iraqi city. I hear Iraqi spoken everywhere when I am there—though that may be wishful thinking. There are so many Iraqi cafés in London. Everyone in London who has read the scenario always asks me: ‘So where is this Café Abu Nawas?’ I don’t want anyone to know where it is because its a fiction. Funnily enough, I have found more bookstores which convey the mood that I want to portray.
What is your advice to young filmmakers in Iraq?
You can only learn about filmmaking by making films. It’s like driving a car. I am still learning how to be a director. Maybe I will be a good one in twenty years.