In 2002, the Iraqi-French filmmaker Abbas Fahdel returned home to Baghdad to visit his extended family. Talk of war was in the air, and there was apprehension.
Saddam Hussein was still in power, but it was assumed that there would be an American-led attack before long, as the administration of President George W. Bush had falsely claimed that Hussein was both implicated in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Fahdel had moved to France when he was 18, and studied film at the Sorbonne in Paris. Many years later, back in Baghdad as an adult, Fahdel decided to film what it was like for Iraqis, and his family, as they waited for what seemed to be an inevitable invasion.
Using a handheld, lightweight camera Fahdel negotiated the streets of Baghdad, while talking to his family about life under a dictatorship.
Fahdel’s documentary about the Iraq war, Homeland: Iraq Year Zero, will be screened in two parts next weekend at Dartmouth College. It has been awarded numerous first and grand prizes at international film festivals.
The first part of the 5½-hour long documentary, Before the Fall, will be shown on Saturday, Oct. 8, at 7 p.m. in the Loew Auditorium in the Black Family Visual Arts Center.
Fahdel, who is touring the film to Anthology Film Archives in New York City and the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Mass., will be on hand Saturday for a question-and-answer session after the screening.
The second half of the documentary, After the Battle, which follows what happened in Baghdad after the initial invasion, will be screened at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 9.
The second part of the film contains an event that profoundly changed the lives of Fahdel’s extended family, and because of its effect he was, for many years, unable to finish the film.
What makes the documentary so moving, said Jeffrey Ruoff, a documentary filmmaker and professor of film in the Dartmouth College Department of Film and Media Studies, is “the way in which it clings so closely to the ground of an ordinary middle class Iraqi family’s day-to-day experience which, now in retrospect, in the intervening 13 years, is sort of a disappeared world. There’s a terrible poignancy there.”
Ruoff first saw the film at a festival in France, and was so impressed by it that, after a correspondence with Fahdel, helped arrange his visit to Dartmouth.
What makes the film so notable for American audiences is, of course, that it’s told from the perspective of Iraqis, who find themselves in an impossible position as they maneuver between a dictatorship and then a military bombardment and occupation.
American films about the war, whether feature or documentary, have focused, understandably, on the American experience, beginning with the “shock and awe” of the initial bombardment of Iraq and continuing through to the occupation and the military “surge” of 2006-2007.
But this film documents a portion of the Iraqi experience, which is rarely seen in this country.
“It’s the way in which the film allows you to spend time with people under both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. I can’t say there’s a fiction or documentary film (about the Iraq war) that allows that in the same way,” Ruoff said.
“It’s put together with the skill of a great documentary filmmaker,” Ruoff added.
For information and tickets go to hop.dartmouth.edu or call the Hopkins Center Box Office at 603-646-2422.
The Hopkins Center screens Hermitage Revealed, a high-definition tour of Russia’s premier museum in St. Petersburg, on Sunday afternoon at 4 in Loew Auditorium in Hanover. General-admission tickets cost $15.
The Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph screens All of Me, the Bess O’Brien documentary about eating disorders, on Sunday night at 7. Admission is $7 to $12. For tickets, call 802-728-6464. To learn more about the movie, visit imdb.com.
The “Aging With Grace Film Series” in Woodstock continues on Oct. 28 at 3:30 p.m., with a free screening of Away From Her at the Norman Williams Public Library. Screenwriter-director Sarah Polley adapted the film, which stars Julie Christie in the Oscar-nominated role of a Canadian woman descending into dementia, from Alice Munro’s short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain. The library is co-sponsoring the series with the North Universalist Chapel of Woodstock and the Thompson Senior Center.
Today (September 30) is the deadline for teams of aspiring filmmakers to register for Community Access TV’s annual Hallowe’en-o-Thon contest to write, shoot and edit a five-minute film on a seasonal theme. The top-rated films will be screened at Dartmouth College’s Loew Auditorium in Hanover on Oct. 30. To register and learn more, email info@catv8.org or call 802-295-6688.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.