Director’s statement

I was compelled to make this film for personal reasons - it was my way of re-discovering my family, my city and my country after an absence of 30 years.  But as an Iraqi living in the UK, I was also very frustrated with the media coverage of Iraq.

During the Gulf War of 1991 and the 13 years of UN imposed sanctions which ended with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was little sense in the western media of how ordinary Iraqis were managing to live, what was happening to their families, society, institutions, and, certainly, no sense of how they felt about any of it.  Since 2003, most of the coverage we see on our screens in Europe, if it shows Iraqis at all, tends to depict them as victims and that is all. Almost every night for 5 years now, it has been on our TV screens.  But, in fact, all we see is explosions, smoke, fire, people crying, or politicians talking.  We hardly ever seem to actually learn anything about the lived experience of ordinary Iraqis at all; there are almost never any real Iraqi voices, speaking for themselves. As a result, this means that Iraqi people remain as some sort of abstraction for western viewers. They are not shown as fully rounded individuals – ‘just like us’ in many ways, albeit living through quite exceptional circumstances.  And this ultimately means we don’t understand what is happening on the level of lived experience and therefore cannot relate it to our own lives. This made me angry. I felt it was important for people in this country (and around the world) to be able to relate to Iraqis as real people, people like themselves.

I do hope that this film provides an opportunity for audiences to understand what it means to be alive in Iraq at the moment, and what are the human consequences of invasion, occupation, wars, sanctions and 35 years of dictatorship.