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Leaving Baghdad

I’ve just said goodbye to Fadi and Saha, Samir’s son and daughter. They have become my very own Iraqi family over the last 7 months. My leaving nearly became another all too emotional scene that Samir’s family have got used to.

Only a few months ago I filmed a beautiful reunion as Saha’s sister Rita, and her daughter Lulu came back to Iraq after 5 years away. Then, just a couple of weeks ago it was an emotional farewell as Rita went back to the United States. Samir was stood at the airport watching one half of his family leave. He took the arm of Saha, his eldest unmarried daughter, and left in tears. Now it is my turn to leave. I kissed Saha goodbye and ran out of the house as I saw her start to cry. Fadi shook my hand and asked me for my phone. I will miss his cheekiness. 7 months is a long time, and it is difficult saying goodbye when you know it is forever. When you know the chances of seeing them again are remote. It is hard, but something I am facing now. It makes me sad.

“Sean you really are like my brother” Samir tells me as we drive the dusty streets from his house back to our fortress hotel. “I didn’t tell you this before but I really learnt alot from being you.” Samir has been an inspiration to me. The great thing about making films for me is that I can absorb myself in someone’s world. My friends at home always joke, “Why don’t you get a life of your own instead of sticking your nose into other peoples all the time.” But other peoples lives are so much more interesting than mine, especially in a place like Iraq right now.

I respect the honesty and openness that Samir has given me over these months. He has opened the window of his world and really allowed me inside, in a culture where it isn’t so easy to go snooping around peoples bedrooms, asking them the sort of personal questions I like to ask, and filming so intimately that they eventually fall asleep on camera.

It is a privilege that I respect and that I hope will make a great film. It provides an illuminating insight into what is going on here for ordinary Iraqi’s, something often missed in the daily diet of news. My only aim in coming here was to make a film that showed Iraq as it is today, from the perspective of the Iraqis. I think with Samir I have done that and so much more.

But most of all I have made a great friend who I will miss. I’m often asked to describe my approach to film making, the answer right now is quite simple, it is making friends and sharing experiences in interesting places. In everyone I film I see myself, my aspirations of what I’d like to be, but also my inadequacies and my failings. I look for people who are brave and honest enough to confront this, and allow me to film them, naked, often literally.

Within a week of being with Samir I was filming him in the shower, within a month in his bed, now he falls asleep on camera and barely ever has his clothes on, apart from his y-fronts. Such is the raging Baghdad heat.

As the summer sets in, I am packing my bags for the last time. Returning to London to prepare the edit of this film. I am hoping to finish it in time for an important documentary film festival in Amsterdam in November, where I am hoping the film will premiere.

If all goes to plan I intend bringing Samir over for his first taste of fame outside of Iraq.

Famous

Samir seems more tired lately. We drive past ‘bombed-out’ buildings in central Baghdad. “This city was so beautiful” Samir laments, “The only building they rebuilt was the Ministry of Oil. What kind of message does that send to the Iraqi people.”

Later Samir plays in the empty restaurant. He is looking older by the day. He comes to sit with me, we drink a beer, he smokes a fag, “Only two packs today,” he smiles. But he is in pain and worried. “My bones hurt Sean.” He looks up at me like a little boy talking to his mother. “Sean I think I am dying… the cancer is eating me. I need to get my blood checked but I don’t want the doctors to tell me something that will ruin the rest of my life. I am so scared.”

“Sean, I miss my wife. You know I still love her.” It has been 3 years since she walked out on him, frustrated with his philandering with foreign women. When she left he asked her to forgive him, she looked at him and left without saying anything, just wiping a tear from her eye. Samir cannot forget this, “I’m not chasing women anymore because of my wife, I keep thinking of her. But she is sick too.. Maybe we should die together in the States.”

“But you know the one thing I wanted to do in this world was to be famous. I couldn’t to it.. I know I am good at what I do, but I couldn’t be famous.” Samir reaches for his glass and drinks his beer. I look around the empty restaurant where he plays for two hours each night. “Maybe this film will make you famous Samir.” He smiles looking back at me. “Maybe..”

The Piano Lesson

Samir is giving two children a piano lesson in their home. I sit talking with the parents. We get off to a slow start, they seem afraid to speak their mind. There is a sadness in the face of the children’s mother. She looks tired and I sense angry. I am curious to know how Iraqis feel about their life now, over a year after the fall of Saddam. They both look over to their children, “We are tired, tired of it all, you know each day we take our children to school, all day we wait outside in the heat for them to leave..” I know why. The kidnapping of children has been an underground industry in ‘new lawless Iraq’. Ruthless gangs even have offices on the main shopping street where you go to pay the ransom. The couple are dignified like all educated Iraqi’s, and although they have little money at the moment they want their kids to have their piano lessons. Culture has always been important to Iraqi’s. This house has two pianos and beautiful artwork all around. Samir teaches the kids as I talk and drink coffee with their parents.

“The sanctions have destroyed the Iraqi people, ‘they’ needed to do this to us so we could appreciate ‘their’ invasion, ‘their’ gift of freedom.” This couple were so happy a year ago, they were jumping with joy when Saddam fell. They never expected that 14 months later life would be worse than under the crippling days of the sanctions. Then, for 13 years they had no money and food to eat, now they do but without any security. “This is not freedom” the proud mother speaks. Like most parents they take their children to school each day and wait outside the gates all day. They both look at me, “Tell us what do you think? will thing gets better?”

I feel sad. I want to be optimistic but I can’t. I can’t lie to these people who’ve shown me such honesty. “We cannot speak like this to anyone.. we are afraid to express our opinions now. if we support the former regime we are a target and if we support the Americans we are also a target.” Some kind of freedom in new Iraq.

This couple worked together in UN headquarters narrowly missing death by 10 minutes when a suicide bomber blew the place apart nearly a year ago. They haven’t worked since. They have many job offers, as good English speakers they could earn big money with the Americans but they are too afraid. The daily targeted killings are the consequences of earning big bucks. “We have struggled for years now.. we are tired .. we need a break…” they want to visit family in Spain and are thinking of leaving Iraq. They know little of the struggles they will face in Europe. I look around their beautiful house, the great art, books, and pianos. How will these educated, cultured people fare in the west? I fear to think.

“Iraq is not like Afghanistan.. here we are educated, cultured.. we had everything in the 70’s and 80’s, the sanctions starved us and killed more Iraqi’s then all the wars put together. But it did something else – it starved us of books, periodicals.. We were isolated culturally and emotionally from the outside world for 13 years. a first world nation destroyed into the third world and kept there by these crippling sanctions. Saddam never felt the sanctions, he had everything.” Like all Iraqis they are pleased he has gone but cannot trust the future. It is held in foreign hands, hands that have betrayed them before and are capable of doing the same again.

Freedom

I was filming the road at night, surprised that it was so busy when we missed our turn off to Samir’s home, something you don’t do on Iraq’s most dangerous road… the road to the airport. It’s a one-way road so we crept nervously along until we arrived at 4 narrow aisles heading to the airport checkpoint. We took the second aisle and drove down and found ourselves facing the bright headlights of a U.S tank. I was waving my BBC card frantically.. ‘BBC… don’t kill… don’t kill…’ I know how these tanks had squashed numerous civilian cars in the past year, but luckily these kind soldiers let us pass. We made a U-turn and were on the road back. Samir said a prayer. We held our breath, and hoped for the best, and drove the same dangerous road back. Difficult to know danger on an empty road at night. Samir was scared, I knew that because he wasn’t speaking. He spoke only to shut me up. “The danger is out there, it is around us always Sean. You just don’t realise it.” I couldn’t see anything. On each side of the road were the remains of houses and palm trees that had been hacked down by the American’s after the resistance had hidden and fired from there.

We get home safely to Samir’s and hit the whiskey. He was panicking. “Do you realise what could have happened there? We could have been killed by both sides.” Samir worries a lot in this dangerous troubled land. We relax and he opens up to me about his past. He tells me horror stories of his time on the front line in the war with Iran. He still has nightmares, waking up screaming in the night. He cannot forget the face of the young Iranian man he killed. The young mans eyes are still vivid in Samir’s mind, as he sliced open his throat. “Imagine a pianist doing such things. I want to make the world more beautiful with my music not kill people.” On the news we hear that a Bulgarian man has been beheaded by his captures. Another beheading is planned tomorrow.

Saga, Samir’s daughter enters the room looking distraught. Her lovely aunty, Samir’s ex-wife’s sister, has breast cancer. It starts Samir ruminating over his own possible cancer, but he is too afraid to have it checked out. He lights a fag from his 3rd packet of the day. We smoke, eat, and drink whiskey. Saha is flicking through the satellite channels, surfing the 200 readily available stations. I try to imagine the Saddam times when there was only two state channels. “It must be so much better now?” I ask. Saha shakes her head, “No, there are 200 channels but there is nothing to watch, only some music and a food channel.” Samir sits up, “This morning I turned the television on, it was the erotica channel, I couldn’t believe it, there were two men having sex! What is this?” “Freedom?” I suggest. Saha sits up, “No .. this is not freedom, this is dangerous, it is going to devalue our society… Saddam protected it.”

“But surely the Saddam channels were just propaganda?” Saha agrees. “Yes of course they were, they were there to protect him, but they also protected our culture, and the values of our society. Who will protect that now?” Saha flicks through the channels shaking her head. “I will never allow my children to watch this. That is why my sister Rita, will not send her children to school in America. She says it is like a jungle there. Is that freedom?”

“But surely it is better than before?” Saha shakes her head. “Not for me it isn’t. Before I had a job. Now I don’t. Before I had security, could go visit my friends, wander the streets whenever I liked, now I can’t.” Saha sits down opposite me. “Saddam was a dictator but we knew the rules. If you obeyed the rules you could do almost anything you liked. I never needed to have a gun in those days either. In a way that was freedom to me.”

Suddenly the electricity goes out, we continue the conversation in the dark. “Look, they’ve been here for more then a year now and we still don’t have electricity for more then 6 hours a day.” The bedroom is hot and sticky without any power for the air conditioning, the temperature was 50c+ in the shade. Over breakfast we hear a big bomb blast, later we find out it was a suicide-bomber, aiming for the Americans, but killing more innocent Iraqi’s. Saha looks at me. “So this is freedom is it?” “No it isn’t freedom. Freedom takes time.” I reply. Saha looks at me smiling, “Freedom takes time.. Look how long the Americans
been waiting..”

IRAQI’S NEED ANOTHER SADDAM

“Hide that camera will you..” Samir screams. “I told you my area is full of insurgents, they will kill us both. These bastards are destroying everything now. They should kill them all.” I pull the camera down, we continue driving to Samir’s, listening to Mozart on the stereo, the baking heat making us both drip with sweat. Samir’s air conditioner in the car is broken, he doesn’t have enough money to buy a new radiator, he lost all his piano students after the war a year ago. It is not safe to travel anymore, and the roads here are gridlocked since the American’s closed so many main streets.

“You know I wish you could have seen me a few years ago. I was never like this. I had $200,000 in the bank before the 1991 war, then the sanctions came and the money was devalued, and so was all our lives. We were a first world nation reduced to a third world country. Can you imagine that? all the luxuries you like having in Britain suddenly being taken away from you overnight’.

We pass an American patrol. “But I blame Saddam for everything, he gave the American’s the excuse to be here now. He stole 30 years from every Iraqi’s life’. There is a road block, now guarded by Americans and Iraqi soldiers. this is new Iraq.

So why are the insurgents still fighting then? I ask him. Samir believes they are Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters. But many tell me they are ordinary Iraqi’s fighting to liberate their land from the American occupation. We reach Samir’s home, I quickly disappear inside the house, keeping a low profile. The house is hot, the electricity is not working and the generator is not strong enough to power the air coolers. Then the electricity comes on and the air coolers work.

We watch an interview with an Iraqi minister from the new interim government, defiant words on tackling the insurgents. “We will deal with them in our own way, in a way only the Iraqi people know” he smiles, and so does Samir. His words send a shiver down my spine. I see Ariel Sharon appear momentarily in his face. Samir gets agitated, “Iraqi’s need another Saddam, they need a dictator here. There are too many little Saddam’s out there to control.”

Then the electricity goes out again. Samir is angry. “They’ve had a year to get this right… Saddam sorted this out in 3 months after the war in 1991 and look at the place…” he goes off into another rant. I looked out of his window at the war torn neighbourhood, riddled with bullet holes, a US tank lies on a roadside destroyed.

Samir puts his arm around me. “Saddam knew how to run this country. He knew how to deal with his people.”