These Filmmakers Risk Their Lives to Keep Iraq's Movie Industry Independent

Journalist Ben Anderson is no stranger to conflict zones. In the last 15 years, he’s reported from hotspots including the Middle East, North Korea, and South America. He went to Afghanistan in 2007, and has since been back eleven times and released multiple books, films, and news segments about the ugly, human truths he witnessed.

More recently Anderson visited the war-worn city of Baghdad to shoot for The Creators Project series Art World, A New Wave of Iraqi Cinema. “Baghdad feels like a city on the edge,” he recalls. He was there for a suite of stories, and immediately got a read on a city still reeling from years of dictatorship and war, facing the rapid rise of ISIS, who now control roughly a third of the country. “You drive up and down up the river and you can see the Green Zone, palm trees, lovely plush buildings, five star hotels where the top 1% live, mostly politicians and diplomats. But you can only see it, you can’t go in yourself and most Iraqis can’t go in there. The city is very poor with terrible traffic, various militias at numerous checkpoints, rubbish everywhere and people screaming at each other all the time, driving the wrong way around roundabouts, the wrong way down streets. The tension is so high it feels a lot like Gaza.”

Among the citizens simply trying to survive—between three and 30 people die each day —blossomed a group of artists who are thriving in the face of adversity. The Iraqi Independent Film Center (IIFC) opened in 2003 when a group of filmmakers commandeered a building the Iraqi Army had been occupying. “Please guys, we are filmmakers. We need to take this place,” Iraqi-raised but US-educated filmmaker Yahya Al-Allaq remembers telling the soldiers. And with the blessing of the Iraqi cultural minister, they got it. The IIFC now provides a safe haven for creatives who have been systematically quashed for decades, limited to creating propaganda films for the government.

“Why is it called Iraqi Independent Film Center? Why independent?” Anderson asks Al-Allaq as they enter a weathered three-story mansion just a short walk from the bank of the Tigris River. The walls of brick exposed by time and conflict are supported by chipped, Greek-style pillars, which encircle a courtyard filled with ragged old film equipment resting in the center of the building. Auditions, script readings, and film shoots often take place on the roof or balconies overlooking palm trees and blue water. Out of context, it looks like an abandoned resort.

Al-Allaq responds to Anderson’s question enthusiastically, “We are independent, bro!” And continues, “I came from a war era. I need to like show the people what Saddam did in Iraq, what the war did. Also I want to show the victims.” Al-Allaq was born in Baghdad, but traveled West to get his masters degree in film at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. When the US set its sights on his home country, he returned too.

He has worked with co-founder Mohammed Al-Daradji, a de-facto voice and the most veteran filmmaker in the IIFC, since early days of the Iraq War, when they both returned home after learning the craft of film in the West. He assistant directed Ahlaam, several of Al-Daradji’s subsequent films, and has directed three films himself, most recently a short called War Canister (2013).

“When we came in 2003, we were the first people making films after 15 years,” says Al-Daradji. It’s not hard to understand why. During the production of Ahlaam alone, both men were kidnapped and beaten by Al-Qaeda forces, and accused of shooting propaganda for the US-backed Iraqi government. Not long after, they were arrested by the US military, accused of filming propaganda for Al-Qaeda. “Before the war with Saddam’s regime, the cinema, it was propaganda. It was just for Saddam’s regime,” Al-Daradji continues. “We have more freedom here now. After the war, we can do whatever we want.”

With curly black hair and an unkempt beard framing his narrow black glasses, Al-Daradji doesn’t quite look like a founding member of the last bastion of Iraqi film. But the moment his authoritative voice leaps from his mouth, his dozen producer and director credits become an evident part of his presence.

Al-Daradji is a dual Iraqi-Dutch citizen who fled the Middle East in 1995 when a politically-active cousin was killed. He lived in the Netherlands for years until attending The Northern Film School in Leeds, where he graduated with a masters degree in directing and cinematography. When the US government set up camp in his home country, he returned to Baghdad to shoot his first feature film, Ahlaam (2004). It follows three mental ward escapees as they navigate through the chaos of the American shock and awe campaign at the outset of the Iraq war. Son of Babylon (2010) was Iraq’s Academy Award offering for Best Foreign Film in 2011.

Filmmakers Oday Rasheed and Shawkat Amin Korki have produced films about artists living with the chaos of post-invasion Iraq. Rasheed’s Underexposure (2005) follows a fictional film crew, based on the actual filmmakers, as they cope with tragedy by trying to make art. More recently, Korki’s Memories on Stone (2014) follows a producer and a director as they attempt to make a film about Saddam Hussein’s Al-Anfal massacre in Iraqi Kurdistan. Al-Daradji’s 2008 film, Iraq: War, Love, God, Madness, documents the danger of trying to make art in the war-torn city. "A bullet just passed me,” Al-Allaq tells the camera in a particularly intense scene. “So close I can smell it."

The continued existence of the IIFC is a battle in and of itself. “For the vast majority of the people who wanted to be artists in some way, creativity is dead,” Anderson says. “The chance for them to do whatever they want to do is dead. Which is what made these guys all the more impressive.” But the “city on the edge” is just as dangerous now as ever. “One of the front lines is just two hours drive from Baghdad, and you have literally got ISIS bullets zinging over your head,” Anderson says.

In the face of this conflict, the IIFC  is working toward its stated goal of “rais[ing] the level of cinematic culture in Iraq.” This strong belief is the bedrock of the IIFC’s bid for self-preservation in an artistic scene struggling to flourish amidst disastrous military conflict. “We need to make a different cinema. Cinema about the humans, the people, who live here in Iraq,” Al-Allaq says. “We’re never ever scared of the terrorists you know… We're fighting them.” He continues, “I can’t think of a better example of artists being courageous, around the world.”

Learn more about Iraqi films through Human Film.

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