Bombings and terrorism, clashes and conflicts; their aftermath on innocent people and, of course, the crooked politics amidst it all dominate the films in the Osian's Cinefan film festival this year
For Daradji, making the film was as agonising as the film itself. For him filmmaking was as much a war as the one portrayed in the film and the crew itself functioned like a bunch of soldiers. He shot it on location in Baghdad in 2004, had to assemble his cast and crew of amateurs and trained them on the sets. There was no proper security, constant power cuts, he even got kidnapped twice by the American soldiers and his sound-recordist was shot in the legs. No films had been made in Iraq since 1991, for twelve years under the Ba'athist regime filmmaking was next to impossible in the face of the economic and political sanctions. "The very fact that my camera was shooting away in Baghdad then was an indication that the city was still alive. If the camera was running then life was running too," he says. It's frustrating then that he can't show the film in his own country. His crew members travelled from Iraq to see it at the festival in Delhi; he plans another screening in Syria. But despite notbeing able to reach out to his countrymen, he is adamant to keep on telling stories of his lost home. His next film will be about a woman's journey in search of a son who had gone missing in the Iraq-Kuwait war.
Seeds of Doubt (Germany, Samir Nasr) is about an Algerian scientist in Germany who is presumed to be a terrorist in disguise and an ally of the 9/11 hijackers. His wife too begins to doubt.
Todo Todo Teros (Phillipines, John Terros) is an experimental film about an artist who wakes up one day to find that he is a terrorist on a mission to bomb subways.On the subversive power of art.
Hamlet of Women (Algeria, Mohamed Chouikh) is about a group of village women facing up to a terrorist attack.
Monday Morning Glory (Malaysia, Woo Ming Jin) is about men arrested after terrorist bombing of a nightclub and how they are made to reenact it for the media and the police.