Feature Narrative Film
TOTAL BUDGET
US $1,500,000
CONFIRMED FINANCING
US $1,200,000
CONTACT
maysoon@lescontesmodernes.fr
+33475600944
Sara and her neighbors let us into their everyday lives in a middle-class district of Baghdad. Marked by physical and moral mutilations, saddened by the war, and facing extreme ambient violence, each of them tries to find the thread of their existence.
In a typically mixed Baghdad neighborhood in 2006, a community of ordinary people try to live their everyday lives amidst the threat of unpredictable violence. At the heart of these intersecting stories we find Sara, a single mother and novelist, who regains her will to write after witnessing the forced exile of her Christian neighbor and best friend Sabiha.
Sara leans over her computer, frantically searching on the Internet: how many people are dead today? In the meantime, her 7-year-old daughter, Reema, sleeps with the sound of mortar fire or machine gun bursts. Sara writes numbers on pieces of paper that she sticks on a map of Baghdad on the wall. She thinks that maybe, by keeping track of all the attacks, she can predict where the next one will happen.
With the news of Saddam Hussein's sudden execution shortly before the new year, Sara and her neighbors brace themselves for an uncertain future. Yet, like a miracle, each is able to sustain a fragile sense of hope.
Today, there are many challenges to the existence of a tolerant and diverse society. There is a large number of Arab immigrants around the world, most of whom did not want to leave their homes, but were forced to do so; fleeing war and oppression, or simply poverty created by an unjust economic system. Little of the complexity of the geopolitical background—the effect on people’s psyches and the desperation in which they have lived—is taken into account.
In our film, we explore and illuminate the dilemmas people face in regards to staying or leaving. The intention of our movie is to show the real and daily lives of people who might one day, unwillingly, become migrants, and are often unknown and misjudged outside of Iraq and the Arab world. Iraqis have lived through decades of dictatorship, war and sanctions, and since the invasion of 2003, ongoing extreme daily violence and chaos. Their lives are ruptured and full of loss, without any breathing space to process and repair.
The media and the Internet increasingly expose us to violent events. But what do we really know of the lives of the people caught up in these disasters? Almost nothing. What is missing is a sense of lived personal experience, allowing us to see these ‘victims’ or ‘enemies’ as people, like ourselves. I want to create small moments of lyricism. There is also quite a lot of humor in the film—another kind of resistance.
At the Cannes Atelier 2012, we met Maysoon Pachachi, an experienced documentary director, working in Iraq and the Middle East (Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran) for Arte, Channel 4 and ZDF. We were immediately allured by her documentaries and her militant commitment; she created a film workshop allowing young female Iraqi filmmakers to take their first steps, in 2004 in Baghdad. Her determination to use a documentary approach and rich elements of the real world in the writing process of a fiction film also convinced us.
Since this Iraqi project could hardly be financed mainly by the Arab world, it was initially supported by European countries like France and Germany. Given the originality of an Iraqi woman’s view of her homeland, the co-producing countries and Eurimages unanimously supported the project.
Kuwaiti producer Talal Al Muhanna supervised the filming in Iraq. Today, the postproduction and VFX are handled by our French production company Les Contes Modernes and sound post-production is planned with NeueMediopolis in Leipzig.
We do not hide that producing this film is exactly the reason why we were urged to be involved in the cinema industry. Having worked on documentaries for more than 15 years to share the contemporary culture with a wide audience, our objective is now to produce this kind of generous movies in their approaches, demanding and creative in their forms— films that participate in the exchange of ideas in our societies.
2019: Corpus Christi
2018: The Tower
2014: Like the Wind