‘STORIES OF PASSERS THROUGH’: 30 YEARS OF LONGING FOR A HOMELAND
The Iraqi director Koutaiba Al-Janabi tells Federica Marsi about using film to process emotional struggles
The documentary directed by Iraqi filmmaker Koutaiba Al-Janabi was born out of the need to process the loss of a homeland – and of a parent.
The theme of exile has inspired the minds of many in the history of cinematography. From Charlie Chaplin’s comical representation of the American dream, to modern- day documentaries on refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East, producers have often sought innovative ways of conveying what it means to be a foreigner in a far-flung land. Few of these artistic representations, however, can claim to constitute a visual journey into loneliness, longing, fear and displacement filmed over a period of 30 years.
Stories of Passers Through, directed by British-based Al-Janabi, was born out of the need to process losing his homeland and parents at the age of 17.
“It was traumatic,” the filmmaker told The National shortly before the film premiered in London at the Safar Film Festival last week. “Some people [react to this by] drinking or breaking things – I decided to film instead.”
The few grainy pictures that are left of his father – who disappeared without trace when Saddam Hussein tightened his grip on the country as the second in command in the early 1970s – artistically merge with archival footage, stills and long shots that explore the notions of collective memory, nationhood and longing.
The final product takes many names. Cinema critics catalogued Stories of Passers
Through as a creative documentary in which family memories are used as a tool for legacy preservation. For Al-Janabi, it is a “visual diary” he has kept for over 30 years, an intimate self-portrait that holds up a mirror to all generations that have lived through displacement, violence and loss.
“The camera was my soulmate, my Aladdin carpet with which I could travel back to Baghdad from a land where nobody knows me,” the soft-spoken filmmaker tells the audience in London.
Exile is visible in the black-and-white shots of old passenger trains, in the worn-out leather briefcases clutched by travellers seeking new destinations. Loneliness is in the empty streets of silent European cities, in the constant search for memories tarnished by the passage of time.“Father, I am still looking for the soul of my father in the emptiness,” the voiceover recites.
Iraq, the “land of death where death had no meaning,” is the homeland that cannot be forgotten. For Al-Janabi, it is also the place from which his father’s body was never recovered.
“I think this affected me as a person. We never had his body back,” he says. This deeply disturbing experience left the filmmaker paranoid, haunted by a constant fear of persecution. Only when the statue of Saddam Hussein was destroyed in 2003 – a symbolic moment that marked the toppling of the dictator – did Al-Janabi feel liberated. “The person who had been following all these years was no longer there,” he says.
The release of Stories of Passers Through gave him a similar feeling. “I was like a mother who doesn’t want her son to grow up,” he explains, referring to the months prior to the release of his 30-year endeavour. In its form, as well as in its content, the documentary embodies Al-Janabi’s experience of displacement. As a student of photojournalism in Budapest, he saw Hungarian students accessing resources and opportunities that he could not. “I didn’t have anything, so I had to build my movie bit by bit,” he said.
While the final page of his visual diary has now been written, the questions he set off to answer, still linger in the air. Does an immigrant ever stop traveling? Does he ever settle down anywhere? Or does he continue to search everywhere for the lost homeland?
One day, maybe twenty or thirty years from now when Iraq will be in peace, Al-Janabi hopes his film will be a testament to what his generation has suffered.
Will the homeland, “the place where you feel secure and loved,” be able to rise past decades of violence and sectarianism? He seems to suggest so in his last scene, where a soldier buries a stone and a news-blasting radio under an uprooted tree – initiating, perhaps, the process of rebirth it had been longing for.