Bafici
Program
Venues and Tickets
Abbas Fahdel addresses life in Iraq before and after the post 9-11 occupation, through records of people (most of them are members of his family) in a country that suffers the consequences of war.
Homeland (Iraq, Year Zero) brings back something that seems to be increasingly distant from the purposes of cinematographic art: the will, patience, and sensibility to record the passage of time and history. The home movie format allows Abbas Fahdel to achieve a unique and absolutely personal portrait of a city and people (part of his family) devastated by war, subject to decisions from political interests that determine the fate of hundreds of thousands of lives. While every cinema is political, few times has this decision been so painfully close to a personal universe. The films is a call for attention and a handbook for future filmmakers to learn how to record from such a personal view that ends up becoming a universal one. Homeland turns into a real thing a classic sentence that carries lots of film references: we haven’t seen anything yet. CB
D, F, E, P: Abbas Fahdel
Abbas Fahdel T +33 6 6229 7117 E abbas-fahdel@wanadoo.fr W abbasfahdel.com
He was born in Babylon, Iraq, and at the age of 18 moved to France, where he studied film at the Sorbonne. He returned to his home country to shoot the documentaries Back to Babylon (2002) and We Iraqis (2004). He also directed the war drama Dawn of the World (2008).
