Generally speaking, Homeland: Iraq Year Zero discusses the very same thing that we had understood, years ago, as we discovered West of the Tracks, Wang Bing’s nine-hour-marathon that traverses a post-industrial region of China: meaning that, in a part of this world that we don’t know much of – without even considering that it might be that bad –, somebody exists. Abbas Fahdel sends us a sign of life from a quarantine that is much crueler than the one that we are living through nowadays: an almost six-hour-long film about the filmmaker’s life in 2003 Iraq, before and after the American-led bombings. Fahdel’s film weaves a wonderful maze of gazes, reconstructing the world through the always-open lens of his camera and inviting us to witness atrocity and rebirth with our very own eyes.

Just like a flare rocket, Homeland: Iraq Year Zero illuminates the night sky of a country that many people hurried to badmouth, but which was reduced to silence every single time it tried to speak. Fighting visual clichés that have infested our minds – that of Iraq as a territory we are used to see from the heights of an Apache helicopter, through a sniper lens – Fahdel sets the camera à hauteur d’homme and, through the same gesture, reaffirms the right to life of all these persons caught in the fray of an unjust era. How does a country whose images we could never see (if they ever even existed), or rather we didn’t know how to, look like? Some fast-forward history comes in handy here. In 1945, Roberto Rossellini fired the starting gun of modernist cinema, with a film that was born from the ashes of war: Germany Year Zero. Rossellini shoots a blond boy in a decor that is impossible to construct, one that, as the word goes, has to be seen in order to be believed. Ruins – buildings reduced to mountains of rubble, empty scaffoldings that are barely standing, and a wholly devastated social landscape, in which every person strives achingly scrapes a living through petty thefts – weigh heavily upon European cinema, starting from its very birth. Years later, film critic Serge Daney recuperates these haunting images as the Romanian Revolution takes place, and then levies them in the context of the Gulf War which, starting from 1991, brought Saddam Hussein to the global forefront.

From the dictator’s sunburnt Mesopotamian land, Abbas Fahdel closes the loop that has seen cinema and capital-H History join hands in order to handle a terrible legacy, only to have them part ways as television appeared on stage. Again and again, Fahdel’s unpretentious camera sweeps over a Baghdad that is swept by American bombs, in grieving shots that show Rossellini, a filmmaker to whom we owe so much, speaking to us from the future. In front of our eyes, buildings are still reeking of smoke, the office of a radio station lies completely destroyed, along with the national film archives. The faces of people who have worked in these places for their entire lives must be seen, in their resignation at the thought of mortality, in order to grasp that Fahdel is restoring humanity to people, and isn’t allowing us to look the other way. Borrowing from Daney (whom he has closely studied) his fascination for television, Fahdel repeatedly records the set as it displays unabashed odes to the military tyrant, rolling in a loop on the television stations, right up until the American invasion. It’s Daney himself who would end up writing that “in a country (Iraq) or (Arabic) side of the world, in which the only authorized image is that of the Leader, and where any leader is, ultimately, a warlord (and any lost war is yet another victory), the image of this individual is always a collective image”.

Considering that every diary-film is simultaneously a work of memory and one in which real-life people slowly become characters that are closely watched, it would be right to say that Fahdel puts us, for the first time, face to face with the individual destinies of the Iraqis. Observing a nation that is caught between an ubiquitous leader and an occupation army that wrecks their homes and sets their lands on fire, the film doesn’t lack haunting images: for example, an apparently anodyne, yet harrowing scene shows Haidar, a twelve-year-old-kid who is afraid of bombings, duck taping the windows to his house over the places in which it had already been taped in the prior war. It’s a film about people for whom peace turns into the anomaly that takes place between two wars (and, in spite of Baudrillard’s objections, the Iraq war would inevitably have taken place twice), but even so, Homeland: Iraq Year Zero is still an unexpectedly lively film. Surrounding itself with lively little brats at all time, the film discovers exactly what philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman had communicated in a different context: it is precisely children that are „the main opponents, undisciplined par excellence, that know how to traverse history (…) They often know, even more so than their own parents, how to accept the wall, meaning, to pass through all the walls that oppose their wish of advancing in life.”

Fahdel isn’t a poet, but rather a visual graphomaniac, animated by the need to preserve everything that he is seeing, in a country where everything calls for reinvention. So it goes that, in his hands, the camera is driven by a state of grace which sees the death of a bee in a small puddle as being just as heartbreaking as a shot of the war-torn city. It’s just one of the images – true, human, heartening – in this dense film, that speaks about very concrete things: family life, the markets of Baghdad, children playing on a riverside and so on, without any kind of pretentiousness or folkloristic tendencies. Passing through fire and shrapnel, the film becomes a mirror in which every single one of us can rediscover themselves, by meeting the other.

Homeland: Iraq Year Zero can be watched here (first part) and here (second part).

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.