‘I just want to make films – I’m a filmmaker, not an insurgent or a soldier.’ Mohamed Al-Daradji’s sentiments are normal enough; he’s a director after all. But when it comes to making movies in his Iraqi homeland, it’s never an easy task. Reports of kidnappings, suicide bombs and violent confrontations have long been the mainstay of news programmes that beam back reports to a largely numb Western hemisphere. But what if there were another Iraq? An Iraq where, against all the odds, something positive was taking place? Striving to show an alternative vision of his country, Al-Daradji is at the forefront of the push to re-establish the arts within Iraq and to stimulate a cinema industry that once ranked amongst the most established in the Arab world.
Take a stroll through movie history and there are plenty of flicks wrapped in a cloak of intrigue, inflated by tales of mysterious happenings and dangerous liaisons. But nothing can compare with Al-Daradji’s experiences filming his first feature in Baghdad in 2004. The 31-year-old’s normally animated face glazes over when asked about the shoot. ‘It was not easy,’ he confides. ‘There was no electricity, no petrol, no money, no food and sometimes no place to stay in the desert [where we filmed].’
