Ahlaam

Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji created Ahlaam under extraordinary circumstances. Not only was the crew abducted and interrogated by both insurgents and U.S. forces, but a cast member was also kidnapped, and a 14-year-old boom operator was shot in the leg during filming. Despite being made under harrowing circumstances, Ahlaam emerges as an astonishing and provocative montage of desperate people trying to make sense of cruelties in pre- and post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. The story, which unfolds in 2003, involves two patients in a mental hospital—a soldier whose AWOL scheme backfires badly, and a young bride-to-be whose wedding is disrupted when Saddam's police arrest the groom. Both patients escape when the facility is bombed during the U.S. invasion, after which they find themselves in an unfamiliar new Baghdad full of looters and gangs of marauding thugs. While the plot device of mental hospital patients loose in a deranged war-torn city may sound familiar (as in the 1966 cult classic King of Hearts), Ahlaam is a riveting work of guerrilla filmmaking that offers a raw, brutal dissection of a society torn asunder by external forces and then further ravaged by locals. Powerfully presenting the Iraq War from the Iraqi point of view, this is highly recommended. (P. Hall)