In the first year, 2005, the school had an enrollment of around 25 students ranging from high-school students to college graduates. The only requirement was commitment, hard work and a spirit of cooperation. Four finished films came out of the first documentary course. A second documentary course started in March, and another one is planned for next year. Although places are limited, due to limited funding and equipment, with each new course more and more students apply. With its popularity increasing, the school is looking for additional resources and faculty. So far it is funded by international charities, trade unions and private donations and gets help from local photographers and filmmakers. Three of its films will be shown on Al-Jazeera’s new English-language channel (scheduled to start airing in November), and Hiba Bassem’s “Baghdad Days” will be shown at the Amsterdam Film Festival, a noteworthy event in the documentary world.
What the finished films demonstrate, precisely, is how the students in the school and their friends struggle to survive, and why that job has become so difficult. These are not stories of the Green Zone—the center of the heavily protected international community . The young moviemakers are out on the streets, telling their own stories and those of the people around them who are not only trying to get by, but to create, even to dream. Kifaya Saleh’s film “Hiwar " profiles Qasim Alsabti, who has run an arts center in Baghdad for many years. Following the burning and looting of the library of the former Saddam Center for the Arts [now the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art] in 2003, “I began a new project,” says Alsabti. “I used covers of old books which had been trodden underfoot or burned. The result was an unusual artwork called ‘The Mask of the Text,’ where I suggest that the book jackets which used to cover these texts are a kind of mask concealing a great deal. The cover speaks of our bitter experience. It is a witness to the intentional burning of our libraries and cultural centers .”
Pachachi likes to draw a contrast between her students’ reality and the weird videogame image of Iraq that emerges in most news coverage: “All you see is smoke, fire, people crying, politicians and generals. But there is a hunger for information about what life is actually like in Iraq. And these simple films really give a sense of what it is like to be an Iraqi at this time of history, and that is important.” They powerfully point to a simple truth: it is the chronic—almost banal—persistence of terror that weighs so heavily on the people of Baghdad.
