Leeds filmmaker faced kidnap, torture and attacks to shoot debut feature in Iraq - now on cinema release in the UK
There are tales of filmmakers acting
like war heroes, battling against the odds to complete their film true
to their vision. There's Francis Ford Copolla in Hearts of Darkness: A
Filmmakers Apocalypse clinging onto a helicopter as it took off to
go fight in Cambodia, the whole journey of production on that film a
kind of brute heroism. Tales of crew dying on Werner Herzog's
Fitzcaraldo suggest that powerful cinema was a battle against the
forces of nature, while Kubricks long time obsession with Napoleon, seem to be a reflection of the film director as war general, invading one
reality, and imposing another on top.In the beginning they were calling me 'Mohammed the crazy' because if you
want to make a film in the war zone it is not acceptable. People are
scared, they want to protect themselves, how can you go in the middle
of the street, making films?
But none of these people come
close, in terms of gung ho guerilla filmmaking guts, to Mohammed Al Daradji, whos Ahlaam is currently on release in the UK. Not
content to shoot a film about Iraq while the war still waged, Al
Daradji returned to the country to shoot it there. He dressed extras up
as Saddam's Bathist thugs and rehung photos of Saddam to create
flashback scenes. He recreated battles on the streets of Iraq with
soldiers and burning cars (see right), while real battles raged streets away. And
in doing so he shot the country's first feature in over a decade, using
a largely untrained local cast and crew, some of whom had been imprisoned
under the Saddam regime. The team were shot at and threatened so many
times that Daradji took to holding a machine gun in one arm and his
camera in the other. His sound recordist was shot in both legs, and he
and the crew were kidnapped first by the insurgents, accusing them of
making a pro-USA film, and then the Americans, accusing them of making
a pro-Al Qaeda film.
I've heard many stories of filmmaking against the odds - but none like this, while
there are arguably few films right now as important as this one: a tale of Iraq
during the conflict, shot during the conflict, with local actors and
crew, filmed by a national, against all the odds. It doesn't take sides
or try to prove a point. It just presents the human side of the story.
It's like the girl in the red dress in Schindlers List: in the midst of
the death tolls, chaos and photos of sandy devastation, it reminds
us that the people at the centre of this mess are really just like us;
with broken hearts, hopes for the future and unwanted hair loss. Do
anything you can to see this film, and show it to as many people as
possible. For me it is the reason why cinema is great - in a heart of
darkness it shows the light of the human.
Background
For me it was
like 'to be or not to be'. During the two or three years of making
Ahlaam, it was like for myself, what are you doing, who you are, what
can you do?"The idea came from the BBC on the 10 O'Clock news. It was the
beginnning of May, a couple of weeks after the fall of the Sadham
regime. It was a reportage about a mental institution. And I saw
Ahlaam, the main character, she was wearing a white dress, and she was
speaking a nonsense language, and this image of the lady speaking a
nonsense language wearing a white dress in an empty room, this stayed
in my mind. And when I went to bed, I dreamt about Ahlaam. She was on
the streets of Baghdad in the scene that you see at the end of the
film. That's what I saw in my dream in 2003.
"I woke up and wrote down the idea, and then two weeks later when I
finished my degree I went back to Iraq and I was looking for mental
institutions. I visited an institution by accident becuse I told my
friend I would help some of the mentally ill people who were on the
street. It was chaos, there was no government or anything. When I
helped one of them back to the instituion, I asked what had happened to
them and he told me their story. And so I based the foundation of the
story, 50% on what had happened with these people. And so 50% is a true
story, 50% fiction. "
Full in-depth interview follows...