Iraqi everyday realities in a short film

The event is inspired by the “Revolutionary Cinema Tent” of the protest movement that occupied Baghdad’s Tahrir Square in 2019. Young filmmakers came together there to document the awakening and their stories. In doing so, they have repeatedly encountered recent history.

What turning point does the US invasion mean for the young generation of Iraqis - until today? How did you experience growing up in the unstable post-war period?

Far away from the violence that the country is still experiencing, the short films document the reality of brick factory workers, who can only be documented under danger, intimate love stories from everyday life or how it is as a young man in Mosul to live with the "guilt to have survived”.

In the film "Messi Baghdad" the priorities of a small boy from a village in the outskirts of Baghdad become clear: football and not the smoldering violence of the sectarian war of 2007.

The film “The Survivors of Fardous Square” documents how a young civil society appropriates from below the square where the historical images of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussain took place.

The possibilities and limitations of Iraqi filmmakers in today's Iraq and the complex Iraqi reality(ies) of the last 20 years will then be discussed with two filmmakers in the Moviemento Lounge.

With:

*Abdulrahman Hameed is an Iraqi filmmaker, visual artist and photojournalist based in Baghdad.

*Yezen Albu-Mohammed of Workers Against Sectarianism(WAS). WAS is a leftist Iraqi group working through media relations against the dominant social and political system of sectarianism. Using videos from everyday Iraqi interviews, they try to offer alternative narratives and formulate a critique of the neoliberal post-2003 system.