I've just returned from Iraq. Not the theatres of war of Mosul or Baghdad, but the wings, in the Kurdish north.
Like many a stage wing, Kurdish Iraq is humming. There are constant jokes about the action "down the road." One minute the landscape is all waterfalls and rivers, with kids splashing around in dappled sunlight, then, a bit further along the same road, such bucolic scenes are replaced by biblical ones, of kids dressed in turquoise driving goats across a distant valley. Theme parks—or dream parks as they're called here—with flumes and big wheels shimmer in the furnace heat. I saw sheep on basketball pitches, peacocks and a gazelle. At one point, dust devils turned the sun white and the light pearly.
I was in Iraq to make a documentary, and the filmmaker in me couldn't put my camera down. This corner of the world has long been a magic realist landscape—this is the land of One Thousand and One Nights and the epic Kurdish fairytale love story Mem and Zin, first written down in 1692. Stories are usually told here when people are woozy from the shisha pipe; fables recited in the fabulous shade of a riverside tree or a nomad's tent. I sat in one such tent, on fine carpets, sipping sweet tea, then realised that the bump under my rug was a machine gun.
Magic and trauma: I was both entranced and dispirited. It became clear to me that if a place this ripe with narrative, this full of drama and loss, is to recover, it will have to start telling new stories about itself. Given that Iraq is so overwhelmingly pictorial, some of these stories should be told on film.
Iraq and Kurdistan have never been filmic hotspots. Egyptian and Iranian films have sporadically played in northern cities like Irbil and Suleymaniye since the 1950s. The Turkey-born Yilmaz Güney was the first Kurd to make a major impact on the movies—he was a kind of middle eastern Sean Connery, starring in over 100 films from the late 1950s onwards before turning to directing in 1966. Güney was also a dissident who spent years in prison, and he eventually won the Cannes Palme d'Or with Yol, which he directed by proxy from behind bars in the early 1980s (he escaped imprisonment in time to receive the award). In 2000, the Iran-born Kurd Bahman Ghobadi directed the first of a series of musical, fable-like, highly visual films, A Time for Drunken Horses. The third in this series was the multi-award winning Turtles Can Fly (2004). The scene in which the armless brother of the main female character seems to disable a landmine with his teeth is one of the greatest in recent cinema.
As I was driven through northern Iraq by Sami, who would play American rap one minute, weepy Kurdish songs the next, I would see, again and again, some great vista which he'd tell me had been snapped up for oil exploitation by foreign investment in a handshake deal with the Iraqi government. Wouldn't film be a good use for some of this money, too?
I realise this proposal sounds frivolous, but it isn't. Films are great ways of bearing witness, of expressing complex national or regional identities, of narrating and therefore, to a degree, transcending the fog of war and its hurt, fear and confusion. All the coalition countries could chip in. But film has been one of America's most successful exports for nearly a century now, and since the US co-invented movie technology and therefore in a way co-owns cinema, is it not best placed to make a gift of film to a country that lies in fragments?
On my final days in the north of the country, I went to the city of Dohuk, a riot of pistachio green and soft pink buildings which dazzle after the dust of the Irbil plain, and lie in a broad valley between splendid hills. I met the city's cinema minister, Wiyan Magi, who has made several short films herself. I asked her what role film might play in the future of Kurdistan. She spoke passionately to me about how children learn from film, how her city needs better cinemas and how, through film, the Kurds could learn to be proud of their culture. Magi's last comment to me was: "my camera is my gun." This troubled me at first, but, of course, the progression from shooting bullets to shooting film is a move in the right direction.
Iran has been a great place for cinema since its revolution. Its major directors, such as Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, Samira Makhmalbaf and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, have won scores of prizes. Couldn't Iraq achieve something similar? The history of film shows that great directors are born everywhere. The Kurds of Iraq certainly have something to say—now all they need is access to training and equipment. If the kids with lively minds I met in the wings of war received the chance to learn the imaginative art of filmmaking, might not another Bahman Ghobadi emerge? And if so, isn't it possible that such a filmmaker might hold up a revealing new mirror to her or his nation?
