On a hot summer’s day, veterans of Iraqi cinema, government officials and their bodyguards join a clutch of diehard fans for a ”special evening” at Baghdad’s main theatre.
The event is billed as the ”first Iraqi film festival” since the United States-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but it is more like a tribute to the good old days.
Many who attended are eager to forget the bitter daily realities even for a short time, focusing instead on brighter moments in the country’s tumultuous recent history that has included wars, sanctions and coups.
Guests trickle into the National Theatre in the capital’s Karradah district, once the haunt of artists and bohemians, after a thorough search and patting down by burly guards at the gate.
A car bomb exploded just outside the theatre on June 17, killing a passer-by, one of a string of attacks in the capital despite a massive security operation under way since mid-June.
Baghdad at night is an eerie and dangerous mix of security concerns, a dusk-to-dawn curfew and power cuts. Theatre performances have been restricted to matinee performances.
Inside the entrance hall, faded photographs of Iraqi directors, actors and producers are pinned to a large bulletin board.
Scenes from black-and-white movies from the 1950s and 1960s flicker on a small screen nearby as a singer accompany a quartet playing traditional instruments and belting out popular folk songs.
The guest of honour, the deputy culture minister, claps as he sits on a fake leather sofa surrounded by sweaty bodyguards with machine guns and pistols.
In one corner stands a woman with cropped white hair. Eyes shut, she sways to the music.
”I was tougher than the men. I used to carry my heavy camera on my shoulder. I filmed a speeding train once and I worked in fields on the Iranian border filled with land mines,” Sana Ali Abbas (61) says with a smile.
She proudly introduces herself as the country’s first female cinematographer with 20 documentaries to her credit.
Abbas pulls from her purse a photocopy of an article about her in the May 8 2001 edition of the now-defunct al-Jumhuriya daily, the widest-circulation newspaper during the rule of ousted leader Saddam Hussein.
She came for the event with her daughter Nibras (37), all the way from their home in Baghdad Jadida, one of the capital’s most volatile neighbourhoods and the scene of frequent sectarian killings.
But they prefer not to talk about the violence or say whether they are Sunnis or Shi’ites.
”Darkness always turns into daylight,” Abbas says.
The national theatre became a depositary for Iraq’s modest cinema heritage after the bombardment and subsequent looting of the national cinema and theatre department at the Rasheed theatre on the west bank of the Tigris.
The building was stripped bare by looters and torched, a fate that befell most public institutions, including the national library and museum, after US troops seized Baghdad on April 9 2003.
”We have lost forever the masters for 12 of the 99 films produced in Iraq and a lot of what’s left is damaged,” says Qassim Mohammed (53), the current head of the culture ministry’s cinema department.
Mohammed and his assistant in the archives and projection room, Hussein Alwan (52), are trying to restore and preserve some of the damaged film using elementary techniques.
”I wish I could get my film The Mermaid of the Euphrates back,” laments director Abdel Hadi Mubarak (73), who stands nearby. His white hair is slicked back and he is clean-shaven except for a thin moustache.
Mubarak, considered the doyen of Iraqi cinema, made the film in 1955. Its plot, about a girl who defies her father and tradition to pursue her university studies, was bold for its time.
Taking some old photographs out of a plastic folder, he reminisces about better days.
Here he was on the set of the first purely Iraqi movie, Fitna and Hassan, produced in 1947 by Studio Baghdad — a company founded by an Iraqi Jew, a Muslim and a Christian.
Practically the entire tiny Jewish community fled in the 1950s, and Christians are now also leaving an increasingly inhospitable homeland.
Mubarak speaks fondly of Saddam’s times, despite his resentment over the regime’s virtual monopoly of television and film production and its obsession with historical epics and works with heavy political messages.
”The problem with Iraqi cinema was that it did not have the sex appeal of Egyptian cinema with its women frolicking in bathing suits,” he says.
He points to a fading yellow poster on the wall behind him of the movie The Desert’s Hero, made in the late 1980s about a brave Arab tribesman fending off invaders — a clear allusion to Saddam.
Asked what he thinks of Iraq now, Mubarak says: ”It’s too painful, I can’t deal with it. I stay home most of the time.” — AFP
