REVISITED: Our River... Our Sky - Maysoon Pachachi's harrowing glimpse of daily life in 2006 Baghdad

Abla Kandalaft, carrie, Viewing Pleasure — 2023-07-12T13:07:00Z

Ahead of its UK release in the Autumn, here's our review of Our River…Our Sky (aka Kulshi Makoo in Arabic), Iraqi filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi's most recent feature film.

Enjoy your summer, everyone!

Set in Baghdad in 2006, specifically between Christmas and the Adha Eid, the film tells the stories of ordinary Iraqis going about their daily business against a backdrop of random bombings and kidnappings that plagued the country following the American-led invasion. The central character around whom other lives unfold is single mother and writer Sara, whose bread and butter is writing CVs. We follow her, unable to write her novel, doing the school run, increasingly losing hope of a better future. Abu Haider drowns his despair in alcohol, while his son is increasingly at risk of being co-opted by sectarian violence, Tamara escapes into music and fashion, Mona is pregnant but pines for her other children from a previous marriage, Yahya debates whether or not to stay in his job... 2006 was a particularly low point for Iraq, three years after the invasion, the US-imposed government had fostered sectarian divisions and violence was commonplace. The film was shot mostly in Baghdad, with Iraqi actors now mostly living in various European countries, and is a rare and much needed depiction of the impact of the invasion and its consequences on Iraqis.

Pachachi's patchwork of daily life in 2006 Baghdad gets the audience up close and personal with its ordinary citizens, living their lives, working, resigning, going to school, flirting online, bringing home like nothing else the sheer cataclysmic upheaval wreaked on their lives by the seismic repercussions and outcomes of the invasion. Sara, Djila, Ahmed and many others are trying to get on with their mundane routines amidst kidnappings and random slaughter. During a post-screening Q&A, Maysoon, who lives in London, brought up the way in which media reporting of the "war" back then would depict satellite images, wide shots of smoking buildings and tanks crawling through desert landscapes, at no point showing the nitty gritty of the reality on the ground. Exposing how people that are fundamentally so similar to UK audiences are made to cope with such a reality should stir the hearts of an international audience that's so often encouraged to dehumanise the victims of these endeavours.

The film also acts as a love letter to Baghdad and Iraq as a whole. Maysoon centres intellect, culture and literacy. Sara would love to exploit her PhD in English Literature, the kids play-act scenes from old plays... Reminding us that the country has a proud literary and artistic history, which, despite the essentials of daily life being torn apart, still has its place. Most importantly, the film champions those Iraqis who've stayed to rebuild their country, the young people who've shown so much resilience and ability to create something new. Let's not forget that the country was subjected to another wave of barbarism with Isis running wild a few years later. However, Maysoon injected much needed hope when she described her 2019 visit to Baghdad, when she shot the film. She'd arrived only to be met by huge creativity, hustle and bustle, busy cafes and wild wedding parties.

The film will be released on 22 September 2023.

Starred Up

Viewing Pleasure — 2014-05-16T11:37:32Z

David Mackenzie's new film is a much-welcome addition to the British prison drama genre, that weaves sophisticated narrative into a bold critique of the penal system and a mockery of rehabilitation inside.

Set in the microcosm of an English prison, Starred Up is the story of serial offender, 19-year-old Eric Love (Jack O'Connell), who has left the relative comfort of foster homes and juvie, to join inmates, including his estranged father Neville, (Ben Mendelson), in an adult prison. The film opens with prison staff processing and strip-searching an unwavering (even bordering on indifferent) Eric, who is escorted to his new cell in a maximum-security unit. When the cell doors first slam behind him, Eric proceeds to settle in, fashioning a weapon by welding a razor blade into a toothbrush and neatly placing bottles of baby oil on his cell shelves, which he will later douse himself in for protection against riot police. Within the first 24 hours, he will have beaten up another inmate over a lighter, fought with prison guards and had his cell blitzed by riot police who struggle to restrain him. As the prison governor, Hayes (Sam Spruell), prepares to send him into solitary confinement or do much worse, the prison psychotherapist, Oliver, (Rupert Friend) convinces him to let Eric join his anger management group therapy, held with 3 other inmates.

Whilst O'Connell's character certainly knows how to assert himself with inmates and prison guards, the meeting with his estranged father, placed in his same wing, constitutes lesser known territory. It is here that we must thank MacKenzie for refusing to give us a drama about a young man with 'daddy issues'. Steering well clear of sappy romanticism, Starred Up presents a skillfully constructed relationship between an absent father and desperate son who, ironically, are locked up in the same place. For Eric, interactions with his father bring out a vulnerability that quietly compliments his deep-seated anger. Early on, it is clear that both sentiments stem from his profound insights into life's shortcomings. Eric's attempts at communication are met by a desperate Neville, who uses his clout in the prison pecking order to express an uncomfortable paternal instinct. More often than not, their relationship spirals into jealousy, anger and embarrassment, all of which are dramatically interrupted when Neville physically rescues Eric from a murder attempt planned by the prison's administrators in the film's final moments. As Neville is finally transferred to another prison, his very last words to his son are a darkly humorous 'I'm proud of you'.

MacKenzie's achievements, however, go far beyond his remarkable portrayal of this dramatic relationship. Although some may be left feeling - in the words of a Daily Mail reviewer - 'thankful that people like Eric are inside', others will be forced to question what the hell prison is for, or rather, what on earth prison is. But Starred Up does not invite viewers to embark on a formulaic search for answers. Corruption is far too endemic in this nick and rehabilitation a little too farcical. Individual actions emerge as mundane reproductions of a system that can survive, although not always thrive, regardless of the agents who exercise power within it. The treatment received by Eric and other inmates is not down to the moral defects of individual police officers. Punishment is not merely directed by the prison governor in power, nor is it simply administered by certain inmates to whom prison authorities have devolved a degree of control. In this context, the narrative of prison 'as progress' towards anything at all becomes too surreal for viewers to pursue. We soon have little choice but to assume that prison's greatest power emanates from the threat of incarceration it produces.

Starred Up's powerful reflections are only marginally disturbed by certain fractures that appear within the film's narrative and character development. Alongside the lack of sophistication with which less dominant themes are presented, such as inmate homosexuality and the pushing of contraband inside, Mackenzie's development of the role of Eric's therapist falls short of brilliance. Oliver's personal ambitions, abandonment issues and his feelings towards the prison establishment are clumsily elaborated. Although his ultimately ineffectual work as a rehabilitator is key to the film's central premise, the parallels we are encouraged to draw between him and Eric and his violent resignation in the film's later stages, are lacking in dramatic quality.

Perhaps much to the dismay of some, Starred Up affords little space to imagine the development of a solidal relationship between inmates, as every pursuit of meaningful connections is violently interrupted by outbursts of rage and acts of resistance, in which individual inmates remain protagonists. However, Mackenzie has made it difficult for viewers to separate Starred Up's distinct aesthetic mode from what feels like its mechanical reproduction of reality. Some would argue that this makes it a work of true realism. Deciphering the role of cinematic production is a complex and arguably circular task, but there is little doubt that this film revives our sense of the brutally surreal workings of incarceration, rehabilitation and social control, beyond political agendas and theoretical prescriptions. As for the places those reflections may lead us, well, that is most certainly down to the subsequent interventions of viewers.

Dir: David Mackenzie, 2013

myDylarama

REVISITED: Our River... Our Sky - Maysoon Pachachi's harrowing glimpse of daily life in 2006 Baghdad

Starred Up