Film: Leaving Baghdad
by Koutaiba al-Janabi
Iraq 2010
Fiction, 85 min, Arabic/Engl./Hungarian ENG ST
Guest:
Saleem Al-Bahloly (EUME Fellow 2014/2015)
This is the fourth and last part of the "Beyond Spring: Arab Film Series" from May 21 - June 6 in cooperation with Mayadin al-Tahrir e. V. and the Werkstatt der Kulturen.
Sadiq, the personal camera man of Saddam Hussein is on the escape taking a long journey to Europe. He is not only haunted by the images he shot for the dictator, he has also some personal issues to grabble with, most importantly the disappearance of his son who did not share his father’s political views. For the footage supposedly shot by fictional Sadiq the director used archival material from Saddam Hussein’s meanwhile accessible archive. He weaves them elegantly into his serene and documentary like fiction.
Koutaiba Al-Janabi was born in Baghdad. He studied photography and cinematography in Budapest, Hungary. He directed and produced short films, documentaries, as well as television programmes and won several awards for his work as a cinematographer and as a director. The Hubert Bals Fund supported the development of his coming feature project Night Trains. Leaving Baghdad is the first feature length film as a director.
Saleem Al-Bahloly has just completed a PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has an A.B., also in Anthropology, from the University of Chicago. With a focus on the Middle East, his research concerns the other histories of modern art outside the context of its formation in Europe between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is in particular interested in the relation between those other histories and the histories of political violence. His dissertation, “The Freedom of Despair: Art and Violence in the Middle East, 1941-1979,” examined the establishment of a practice of modern art in Baghdad, in the context of both the public sphere, that had emerged with the new Iraqi state, and a wider cultural revival across the former Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It traced the development of a particular form of critique in this practice of art as that public sphere was collapsing in the sixties and seventies, a critique that responded to a new kind of violence that was appearing not only in Iraq but across the Arab world.
Viola Shafik, PhD, is a freelance filmmaker, film curator and film scholar. She authored among others Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, AUC-Press, Cairo, 1998 and Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation, AUC-Press, 2007. She lectured at the American University in Cairo and the Zürich University and is in the selection committee of the Rawi Screenwriters Lab and the Berlinale World Cinema Fund. She directed several documentaries, most notably Ali im Paradies/My Name is not Ali (2011) and Arij - Scent of Revolution (2014). Currently she teaches at the Humboldt University, Berlin and the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.
