AFF Update V - Ahlaam (Iraq)

Sunday was the close of the 10th Annual Arab Film Festival. I went to see two films with my mate Zach, in Berkeley, and these two were probably the most polished, if not strongest of the entire festival. At least of the ones I've seen. This isn't to take anything away from any of the other wonderful films I've seen, but these two were like gut wrenching kidney blows, or that liver punch that Mike Tyson used to knock people out with, before he took to bitting off ears, and that plays a role in these films believe it or not. We'll do one at a time, starting with the 2pm screening of Ahlaam.



Ahlaam

Picture yourself in a prison. Picture yourself in a hospital. Close your eyes and imagine incarcertaion vs. rehabilitation, picture that clinical white, the machine that goes ping and the clang of bars, the batons and that lack of freedom that is called to be disciplined and punished. Now open your eyes, the image you just had two, melted together, smudged with shit and dirt, is something like the beginnings of the mental institution where 3 people find themselves. Ali is a soldier confined to the mental hospital after he was nearly killed in a US air attack in 1998 as part of operation Desert Fox. Dr. Mehdi is a young doctor fresh from the military service that he was forced to join when his academic career was cut short by his family's past history: you see his father was a communist and was executed for treason. Mehdi isn't a member of the Bath party, and because of his family's traitorous past, can't continue up the chain, so he joins the aramy. The last, Ahlaam, is a young literature student, who walks her cell still wearing the wedding dress she was in the day the secret police came and stole her fiance as they were about to wed.

The film starts off in the moment, in the moment of 2003, of the mental hospital, Ali is almost unrecognizeable as a guant figure cowering the corner, a bearded gollum. Ahlaam in her dress and Dr. mehdi running about. Cut to black, back up, start again, tell the story, flesh out the characters, show the world as it was in 1998 under Sadaam. The story is different, Ali is walking down the street, a respected soldier heading back up north to his post at the Syrian border. He is generous and gives money to beggers. On a ferry crossing at the Tigris river the ferry man doesn't want to take his money. The respect he commands is somewhat overwhelming.

In 1998 Mehdi was a promising and over achieving med student who passes his finals and dreams of doing a master's degree. His over protective mother says "Son, don't study so much, rest, they say sleeping more and studying less will help you pass the test." As he sits by candle light in his home at a desk the size of a cafateria tray, scribbling in his notebook and reading while smoking cigarettes and burning that midngiht oil. His classmates think highly of him, he has velocity and trajectory in his life, yet his father's crime of communism and subsequent execution forestalls his ascent, and he falls like Icarus into the belly of the military.

Ahlaam is on the brink, on the brink of becoming a wife, of dawning a true Abaya, of becoming a woman in a certain sense. She is the bridge between families, between the future and the past and she finds herself in a mental institution, still wearing a wedding gown for the day that Ahmed will return and make of her a wife. When you see Ahlaam and her short but intense love affair of words and skipping stones with Ahmed you know that mutus mutandis will bring about even greater joy to the families and these two people, albeit arranged, I'm assuming, are genuinely in love.

Everything is in flux and they are all travelling paths that they don't want to be on, but necessity and or the harsh cruel realities of Iraq at that time force their hands. Ali heads up to the Syrian border with his friend Hassan who is openly critical of the regime. Ali quiets him over nad over again, worried about who might be listening, and who could report Hassan. Hassan has one other problem, his hair, its falling out in patches, and he believes all his misfortune to come from his "condition" with his hair. He's something of a Samson without a Delilah. If it weren't for his hair he would be braver, more able to cope with the realities of living in Iraq. When the bus full of soldiers reaches a checkpoint the security officers come on board and check the soldier's papers. Those returning late, or have lost their orders or passes, those with excuses other than what the document says, are removed from the bus, presumeably, never to be heard from again.

Once Ali and Hassan reach the desolte no-man's land of the Syrian-Iraqi border there's not much to do. And then the bombs come, and there's more to do than they are prepared for. US & Great Britian bombs the north. Their camp is hit. Ali is knocked out and shell-shocked, unable to hear. He wakes up bloody and stumbles around finding Hassan badly wounded amidst a litter of soldiers cluthing the stumbs of where limbs used to be yelling for help or an officer, both in short supply. Ali in his shell-shocked delerium picks up Hassan and begins to carry him, looking for a doctor. There's a moment here where you can't help but think back to Malkovich in his very odd role in the film (Der Unhold) The Ogre, where blind, he walks through the front lines with a boy on his shoulders to be his eyes. He stumbles out into the open desert, cross the border, must have crossed back, is wandering for the entire night and part of the next day, still unable to hear, still shocked, and then he's picked up by the security forces, at which point you assume Hassan is dead. He's accused of desertion and thrown in prison. His trial is a mockery of justice and he's to has ear cut off for trechery and cowardice. After this horrific event he's imprisoned in the mental hospital.

The film resumes in the present of its narrative chronology with a cruel head doctor at the mental institution who believes in electro shock therapy, yells at the patients, kicks them, and has about as much mercey as Torquemada. Mehdi is the opposite, he has the penetrating insight to know that Ali isn't mentally insane, but that how you treat a man will determine how that man will live, and how he will appear under such conditions. The cruel head doctor wheels the screaming Ahlaam in for electro shock, and during the delivery of the first round of shocks, the hospital is hit by a bomb.

Its the morning after, 2 days before the regime collapses. Pandomonium is breaking out left and right, people are dying, houses collapsing as a mostly civil society that has lived together under the unflinching rule of the regime, is comming apart at the seems. The patients of the hospital, and here I don't hesitate to call them inmates when you consider the cruelty of their incarceration as in the case of Ali who is more inmate, confined by the state, than true patient, the delusional Ahlaam, committed by her family as she never recovered from that dreadful day. The patients are loose, the hospital is being looted, Ali and Mehdi try to intervene with the looters but find themselves the targets instead of the nussances blockingt he way out of the hospital. Eventually the search parties are organized to retrieve the patients and Ali begins to run around the streets, in nothing but his boxers, barefoot, looking for the patients of the hospital. Ahlaam's parents take to the street wtih a cleric to help them, they walk around showing people her picture, as she wanders seeing her husband in every strange face and shadow. Her dreams and her waking hours are indistinguishable and she suffers for her inability to see clearly. Delusion is a form of escape, and it is also a kind of punishment.

The director, Mohamed Al-Daradji has produced a powerful story based on the lives of three people in this hospital. The story is bleak and shows us the worst of human nature when a sniper opens fire on people in the street. The confusion is evident, the anxiety of quiet moments to be shaken up by bombs is palpable. There isn't an anxiety that isn't explored in this first film since the fall of the regime. Its a brilliant piece of work that understands the beautiful act of giving a naked man a coat, and how that has a resounding sound through so many other "coats" in cinema history, most recently The Pianist and "why the fucking coat?" These small codified messages of the west, intentional or not, make the film a rich, rich presentation of east and west, as the east's fate seems to rest in western hands. The final scenes of the film are exasperating as the family spots Ahlaam just as US soldiers arrive and fighting breaks out, she flees into a building they are barred from entering. "This is what I get for a lifetime of service and obedience, to be knocked to the dirt in my own country?!" cries Ahlaam's mother as she is toppled by a soldier. And up the flights of deserted stairs goes the frightened Ahlaam, lead by voices, muerto voce, the dead speak, and she answers. Finally on the roof, looking out over what Ali earlier called "beautiful Baghdad" the camera pans round and round and round and it ends, at the height of the crecendo, and you find yourself lost for words, unable to speak, unable to make any sense of what you just saw, and equally powerless to forget it.

See it when you can, or it becomes available.