Trying to find beauty in the darkness of Iraq
Trying to find beauty in the darkness of Iraq
Filmmaker Oday Rasheed wants his movie to rattle Iraqi society into healing, but few here have seen the haunting 'Qarantina.'
Reporting from Baghdad—
The hit man burns photos of the past in a copper bowl on his terrace as he waits, quiet as a ghost. His fixer arrives with a bag of groceries and too many jokes.
They cruise the city until they find their target: a professor walking home from work.
He's punctual, the fixer says with a laugh. The hit man just nods. We'll come back in a week, the fixer says, that's how the boss wants it. But the hit man orders him to turn the car around, keep the engine running. He walks past the tomatoes and eggplants in front of a grocery shop. There is a loud bang and a pause of 10 seconds while he watches the man lying there, and then two more shots.
The hit man isn't real. The character has been plucked from the wreckage of Baghdad's eight years of occupation and civil war — conjured by writer and director Oday Rasheed in a haunting new film called "Qarantina."
The title plays on words: evoking both Iraq's psychological quarantine and the name of a long-demolished army barracks located on a fault line between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods that became a killing field after 2003.
The hit man belongs to no one, to neither a sect nor a family. As he wanders the Iraqi capital, he ponders how everything has changed and stayed the same, so much so he can't stand it anymore. Sentences hang in the air, swallowed by the sounds of Baghdad: the hum of helicopters, the reverberations of explosions, the honking of car horns.
His presence is too real in this city, where assassinations occur daily and men of violence lurk around every corner.
Rasheed, 38, wears dark jeans, with a matching black T-shirt and circles under his eyes. He chain-smokes as he talks at an old house on the Tigris River that looks familiar. It was here that Rasheed's hit man smoked and stared at the Tigris with coldness, but also regret flickering in his brown eyes. And it is here Rasheed dreams about ways to create something beautiful in his damaged hometown.
From his terrace, he looks out at the battered landscape that has changed little since 2003: a gutted brown restaurant tower; the red Defense Ministry building with bullet holes and sniper outposts; the looted telephone exchange.
With its mosaic tiles and airy courtyard, the shaggy eucalyptus trees that shield it from the sun and the breeze off the water, the building speaks of another time. Built in 1913, it has Iraq's first elevator, hidden in a hallway corner, its gears rusted and the shaft dark and empty.
A tiny black-and-white cat sits in a shady corner of the courtyard. Rasheed jokingly calls her his best critic. He and his wife, Furat, saved the cat from neighbors who were hanging her with a noose.
The building belongs to the Culture Ministry, and Rasheed first came here in the 1990s when he joined an experimental theater group. The troupe put on performances merging scenes from writers such as Henry Miller and the beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg.
Serious filmmaking wasn't a possibility under Saddam Hussein, whose biggest foray into movies came when he sponsored a 1980 film on his adventures as a revolutionary, "The Long Days," made by a former James Bond director. Rasheed retreated into the insular world of the theater, as well as making experimental film shorts few would ever see.
Hussein's fall provided an unexpected opportunity. Rasheed and his friends had rushed to guard an old state theater against looters who rampaged in the days after U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. The group discovered 21-year-old film stock that was still usable and decided to make a 74-minute documentary-fiction hybrid called "Underexposure" about a director making a movie about life in the crazy days after Hussein's fall.
"We had gone through the dark exercise of Saddam's history and we were in the weird moment of occupation," he said. "The film talked about everything."