Frame by Frame

This email was forwarded to everyone at my Film School, and I wanted to share it further afield.

It’s from the INDEPENDENT FILM & TELEVISON COLLEGE in Baghdad, and details some of their most recent news, tragedies, and their achievements in the face of it all.

Remarkable, really. Makes you think that little bit longer before complaining about any lack of freedom you may have experienced in shooting/ cutting your most recent project.

1 June 2008Dear Advisors, Supporters and Friends,

We send you all our best wishes and apologise very much for not having written to update you on our situation since August 2006. There has been a great deal of disruption to our schedule and many delays. Our students have, however, managed to produce another 7 films, and we are now putting together our next course.

Our Second Documentary Course
When I last wrote we had begun our second documentary course against a background of rapidly escalating violence in Baghdad, and Kasim was intending to return to Baghdad after the summer break to work with the students who were completing the shooting of their films. When he heard, however, that his youngest brother had been abducted by an anonymous militia and killed in an act of sectarian violence, it became very difficult for him to think about going back immediately.

The students continued to work on their projects, by themselves, but it was proving increasingly difficult to shoot on the streets in Baghdad. One student, Ahmed, came with a hair’s breadth of being shot at by US soldiers, others were routinely stopped, their cameras taken away, tapes examined. Sometimes it wasn’t even the militias or police, just ordinary people worried about anyone with a camera. People were very jumpy.

The students struggled through, though, continually having to change their approach, to improvise and take a different tack, when it became impossible or too dangerous to shoot in a particular place, or with a particular person.

Kasim was in constant contact with the students, trying to talk them through their shooting, but it was not the same as being there. He couldn’t look at their rushes everyday, offer his criticisms and observations and send them out to try again, as he had done during our first course.

In November 2006, the father of one of our ex-students was killed just across the street from the school. He’d come out of his house to see what was happening in the street and was hit by a ’stray’ mortar. Soon afterwards, there were two big explosions very near the school and every single pane of glass in our building was blown out. We’d been lucky; our area had been relatively calm for some time. But no longer.

We cleared all our equipment out of the school and boarded up the windows. It was now obvious that we had to re-locate temporarily, outside the country, if we were to continue. And this we were determined to do.

Our students sent us their rushes. Kasim, in London, reviewed them and then contacted each one with his criticisms. He told them to re-shoot certain things, suggested ways to go, for example, when one student suddenly lost one of his main characters and so on. We decided finally that we would bring the students to Damascus in the New Year to edit their films. Previously, we had been able to do this in Amman, but it had now become much more difficult for Iraqis to gain entry to Jordan, especially for young men. At this point, though, it was still possible for Iraqis to get into Syria (although here too things became more difficult later on), where there was a massive Iraqi refugee population of 1.5 million. In fact, 3 of our current students and 1 former student had already moved there with their families.

Emad’s Story
One of our students, Emad Ali, had a project revolving around a famous old literary café on Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, a street in the old part of Baghdad, full of bookshops and street stalls. Emad had begun shooting in November, but in December (2006) one night about 11pm, as he and his family slept, 3 mortars landed in their house, killing Emad’s father and wife. He, himself, was burned and had to spend 2 weeks in hospital. Emad stopped filming. In March 2007, Maysoon was in Damascus shooting a film of her own and Kasim, also in Damascus, was seeing some of his family who had been forced to move there and shooting some extra footage for a film he’d been shooting for about 3 years. We were also researching how we could bring our students to Damascus to edit their films. We, like all other Iraqis, were shocked when a massive suicide car bomb was set off in Mutanabbi Street, destroying this important and historic cultural area in Baghdad, and the café in which our student, Emad, had been filming before his house had been hit by the mortars. A few days later Emad contacted us saying that for the first time in months he wanted to pick up a camera and go film - in Mutanabbi Street. We told him to be careful, and to use a small Handy cam-type camera. He got some moving and wonderful footage. One day, however, at the end of a day’s shooting, 3 men got out of an unmarked car grabbed Emad’s camera and tried to push him into the car - he knew if they managed to abduct him, he was lost, and so he ran. One of the men shot him in the leg and Emad fell on the pavement. The man then came over, shot him in the chest and foot and the men got in the car and sped away, leaving Emad for dead. In fact, his chest wound was not dangerous, although the bullet is still lodged in his back and his foot wound was superficial. Eventually a woman passing by ran into the street and stopped a car and got Emad to hospital. There, 5 doctors were ready to amputate his leg when another doctor tested the pulse in this foot and decided that the leg could be saved. We helped Emad over the next months by paying for his treatment - an operation, physiotherapy etc - but it became clear that Emad was going to need another more complicated operation in order to be able to walk properly and this was not available in Iraq. We set about trying to find him treatment outside the country.

In the meantime, we arranged for the other students from his course to come to Damascus to edit their films. We rented two small rooms in a house in the Old City and set up our editing equipment.

4 films were completed and then, since it became clear that Emad was not going to be able to travel, his fellow students decided to edit of his film for him. The final film about the Shabandar Café includes Emad’s own story.

There is a description below of the most recent films our students have completed.. These and films from our first course have now been shown in Germany, Holland, Jordan, Syria, Italy and the US. Most recently, 6 students were invited to show their films at the Gulf Film Festival in Dubai. Leaving (Bahram Al Zuhairi) and A Candle for the Shabandar Café (Emad’s film) won first and third prize in the Student Competition section of the festival. The director of the festival, Abdul Hamid Jum’a, went to see the Ministry of Health and they have agreed to treat Emad for free. We were overjoyed, after almost 13 months of trying to find a solution for Emad to no avail. Emad has just had his operation in Dubai and will stay there to do his physiotherapy.

Films produced in the 2006/7 documentary film course

Leaving (23 mins) (directed by Bahram Al Zuhairi, 2007)
Threatened with kidnap and facing escalating and horrific violence in their neighbourhood, a Mandaean family from Baghdad reaches the difficult decision to leave their home of more than 30 years and go to live in Damascus. The film documents the painful process of selling all their goods and dividing up their house so it can be rented out and finally it records their dangerous road trip to the Syrian border and their arrival to their new, temporary home.

Dr Nabil (15 mins) (directed by Ahmed Jabbar, 2007)
A gentle and committed surgeon, with literary talents, works at a small understaffed Baghdad hospital, which suffers from lack of equipment and medicines. While many other doctors have been killed or have fled the country in fear of their lives, Dr Nabil has decided to stay. He worries, though, about the effect that the atmosphere of violence and brutality is having on his young son.

A Stranger In His Own Country (10 mins) (directed by Hassanain al Hani, 2007)
Thousands of Iraqis have been displaced by sectarian violence and have had to seek refuge in other parts of the country. This is a portrait of Abu Ali, a refugee from Kirkuk living in a displaced person’s camp on the outskirts of Kerbala. He is a peace-loving man with a keen sense of justice, trying to find a way to survive and provide for his family in the difficult circumstances in which they now find themselves.

A Candle for the Shabandar Cafe (23 mins) (directed by Emad Ali, 2007)
Founded in 1917, the Shabandar Café in Al Mutanabbi Street in the heart of the old centre of Baghdad, was a cultural landmark, where generations of Iraqis came to discuss and debate literature and politics - a living repository of Iraqi intellectual history and one of the last places where people could gather to exchange ideas. Emad had shot most of his film by the end of 2006, but in March 2007, a massive car bomb destroyed the Shabandar Café, all the bookshops on Al Mutanabbi Street and killed and wounded scores of people. Days later, Baghdad’s poets and artists held a wake in the ruins of the street they loved so much and Emad took a small camera and went back to film. As he was leaving he was attacked, his camera stolen and he was shot in the legs and chest, and his own story is an epilogue to his film about the Shabandar Café and Mutanabbi Street - before and after they were destroyed.

Documentary Course March 2006 (15 mins) (directed by Ahmed Kamal, 2007)
Ahmed Kamal documents the lives of his fellow students at the Independent Film & Television College in Baghdad as they try to get into classes, find the subjects for the films they want to make and deal with the difficulties of trying to film in Iraq at the moment. In the end the college has to close down when 2 people are abducted from the building and an explosion in the street below shatters all its windows.

Films Commissioned by Al Jazeera International
During the period between the last letter in August 2006 and now, 3 of our students were also commissioned by Al Jazeera International (English language) to make short films about life in Baghdad.
They were:
Staying (16 mins) (directed by Mounaf Shaker, 2007)
Mounaf lives in the Dora district of Baghdad, once a lively mixed area full of palm groves. Now US tanks constantly roam the streets, sectarian militias exchange fire and people find death threats on the doorstep when they wake up in the morning. The director describes his life as he struggles to get into work at Mustansiriya University, worries about his father, an out-of-work archaeologist who now has a shop in the house, courts his fiancée and gets married. The pressure on him is intense, but for the moment he is staying.

Thinking About Leaving (10 mins) (directed by Hiba Bassem, 2007)
Hiba lives with her sisters, mother and brother in an area dominated by an armed militia. She is followed back from work and the taxi driver is afraid she will be kidnapped. There is no electricity, no security, danger everywhere. Hiba ruminates about what the past 3 years have brought Iraqis.

Leaving (this was a version of the course film, see above)

The first of the films was broadcast in February (2007), with an accompanying interview with Maysoon, introducing the film school.

Recent US Trip
We recently travelled to the US and showed some of our students’ films and talked about the school. We were invited by Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California as part of their Iraq Re-frame season, and then we held further screenings in New York and Washington DC, as well as doing radio interviews. In New York we had a very productive meeting with NYU film department. They bought a camera, which they have given us on loan, gave us many of their course books and are now trying to set up a way in which one of our students could go to NYU for one of their summer courses. We will continue to have a ‘mentoring’ relationship with them.

School Directors’ Current Work
Kasim has completed his film, called ‘Life After the Fall’ - the story of his family in Baghdad shot over a period of 4 years between 2003 and 2007. It has just had its premiere and won first prize and the Munich Documentary Film Festival. Maysoon is in the middle of editing her film, ‘Open Shutters Iraq’, about a project where 12 Iraqi women came to Damascus to train in photography and then went back to the 5 cities in Iraq from which they came, to shoot photo-stories about their lives there at the moment.

Plans
We have been trying to get official permission to run our next documentary course in Damascus. We will need this if students are to be able to shoot on the streets, for example. The students will largely come from the Iraqi refugee community there and we may include some Syrian and Palestinian students. We have good relations with UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) in Syria and hoping to be able to work under their aegis, in part. This may help us to get the permissions we need.

We are determined to carry on and to try to develop both our own teaching and our students capabilities. And it would be very good to find ourselves in a position where we were able to invite filmmakers from other parts of the world to do master classes, We haven’t given up hope of returning to Baghdad and still have our premises there. But it’s not quite possible yet.

As always, we are in need of more funding and we would be very grateful for any suggestions you have that might help us - for financial or any other kind of support. We could certainly use another couple of DV cameras, a new editing suite and some microphones.

We thank you all for your continued support and wish you a good summer

Maysoon Pachachi
Kasim Abid