BAGHDAD - The carpet was red, but too frayed for the tape around its edges to matter much. A letter of the marquee was lost to the years, a little like the street of shuttered shops, crumbling curbs and gray barricades around it.
But on a recent Thursday evening, an acclaimed film, and an Iraqi film at that, returned to a city where films have not played that much in recent years. And in the theater corridors at the premiere for the film, “Son of Babylon,” there was as much excitement as relief that culture could defy occupation, war, government neglect and occasional hostility to signal its survival.
For the first time in a long time, in a once-grand theater almost filled to its capacity of 1,800 seats, Iraqis watched themselves and their postwar experiences portrayed in film by another Iraqi.
“Son of Babylon” is a poignant tale of a boy and his grandmother searching for the link that binds them, his father and her son, in the tumult of Iraq weeks after Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003. The boy’s father had never returned from the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and their search takes them from the Kurdish north to the rest of the Arabic-speaking country, where they meet truck drivers, military veterans, clerics and pilgrims on the same kind of quest.
They venture through a lonely landscape, soft voices contested by howling winds, where moments of grace intersperse the mass graves in which they fear the father is buried.
The film is the second featurelength movie by Mohamed al- Daradji, a 33-year-old director who left Iraq in 1994 for nine years. But despite acclaim that led to the film’s distribution in 10 countries and invitations to, by Mr. Daradji’s count, 75 festivals, his film had yet to be screened in Iraq.
An hour before it was, crowds of artists, students and bons vivants who usually stick to their own haunts passed Humvees and police pickups to fill a lobby soon billowing with cigarette smoke. Posters for “Rush Hour” and “Godzilla” still adorned the walls, and plastic flowers along the staircase gathered dust, but there was the buzz of novelty in watching a film in the Semiramis, one of Baghdad’s last two cinemas. A generation ago, there were 68 , with names like Al Khiyam, Babylon and Sindibad evoking another era.
“In each house, in each neighborhood, in each street, in each one of us, we have our own movie,” said Hashem Khalaf, a 50-year-old businessman. “Directors in other countries search for years to find a movie. Here, it’s so easy. Movies are everywhere.”
The film’s scenes in the capital, Nasiriya and Hilla, war-scarred and sometimes abandoned, were recognizable to everyone. So was its detail, an intimate eye that captured the nuances of name and place, where the American soldiers of the occupation are anonymous and menacing.
But sitting in a shabby office before the premiere, charmingly relaxed as he offered guests water, coffee or whiskey, Mr. Daradji said that authenticity was secondary to the message that he wanted to convey. The film, he said, is a plea to his countrymen.
“We still live in a culture of violence and revenge,” he said. “But this movie is about justice and forgiveness. Can we forgive when we have the power?”
The crowd erupted in applause at sometimes visceral moments of the film, as when the Kurdish grandmother forgives an Arab soldier of Mr. Hussein’s army. Cheers rose when the boy washed his grandmother’s face before approaching a prison where they hoped his father might be. As the lights returned, perhaps half the audience seemed to be crying.
“This is the real Iraq,” said Ahmed al-Maliki, an art student. “These are the experiences that we had to live through and endure. He understood the soul of this place.”
By ANTHONY SHADID
