The Song of the Missing Men is an extraordinary journey across Iraq, starting with the marsh Arabs in the south and ending in the mountains of Kurdistan in the north. The viewer is introduced to Iraq with all of its multifaceted ethnic groups whose customs and habits were warped, exploited or suppressed under the Saddam dictatorship. The film also explores the increasing sectarian divide and how that has manifested itself in the post-occupation period. This beautifully shot, meticulously researched film will leave a lasting impression and provoke much thought about the societal trends emerging in Iraq.

 

 

 

From everything we see in Iraq, My Country, this is clearly a place of chaos. While Director Hadi Mahood interviews a man about his torture under Saddam, bombs go off at the Police Department where Mahood's brother works. The footage has a sense of raw and powerful immediacy, capturing aspects of the conflict we are unlikely to see on the news. This is a land of date palms, goats, yapping dogs, mounds of rubble, bomb-wrecked buildings, policemen hiding behind black balaclavas, and guns, guns, guns.

 

 

 

 

Voted best documentary at the Iraq Short Film Festival 2005, Damn Gum is a poignant reminder of the risks independent journalists and filmmakers face by trying to report honestly about the war.

 

 

 

Hiba Bassem, a young woman from Kirkuk, returns to Baghdad after the war to finish her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. The film is a diary of her year as she tries to find a place to live, looks for work, graduates from college, deals with family problems and struggles to come to terms with her position as a woman on her own.

 

 

 

The film records the reaction of Iraqis to the suicide bombings that have been taking place in their country with increasing intensity. It examines how these bombings are designed to aggravate sectarian divisions. The horror of these acts is brought into sharp focus by the accounts of children who are either direct victims of terror or witnesses to its devastating reality. The chilling scene of a young kid walking around his neighbourhood, pointing out the houses of his murdered school friends, is one that audiences will find hard to forget.

 

 

 

This is the rarely screened precursor to Elia Suleiman's internationally acclaimed, award-winning Divine Intervention. It sees his silent character ES cameo in a playful but symbolic series of everyday scenarios. With characteristic dry wit and an eye for the absurd at the heart of the mundane, this film is a thoughtful, politically nuanced treatment of the routines, rituals, ceremonies and accidents that punctuate the life of ES on his return home from abroad to Palestine. For Suleiman, the film represents "a journey in search of what it means to be Palestinian…a combination of possible truths, transgressing genres and blending fact with fiction to explore the intertwined boundaries of storytelling, history and autobiography." Winner of the Luigi De Laurentiis Award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival, and the New Directors Special Jury Prize at the 1997 Seattle International Film Festival.