Iraqis Shooting Films, Not Guns

A cherub-faced, computer-generated moppet clutches a magic paintbrush and flies high above the city skyline, before coming face to face with a giant rainbow, which then suddenly morphs into an enormous flag, and back again. It's not the sort of surreal visual whimsy you would expect to see emerging from Baghdad. Yet Abdulbasit Salman's short film Rainbow is Stronger than War is just that - a quirky and inventive vignette that was showing as part of last year's hugely successful International Iraq Short Film Festival.

The event, which will be appearing in an abridged "best of" form at this year's Cambridge Film Festival, includes the humorous and provocative Just Playing, a witty story about a group of young boys playing football next to a minefield. Or there is The Office of Security, an unflinching look at how Saddam's former torture offices have been transformed into shelters for homeless Iraqis. Or Contradiction, a film that examines the murderous conflict between honey bees and hornets. In each case the films touch on the crisis in Iraq, but they do so with creative ingenuity rather than glum political agitprop.

That is the point, says the Baghdad- based festival organiser Nizar Al Rawi, who almost single-handedly put the original event together last September. Al Rawi, who is part of a collective of artists, designers, sculptors and musicians, explains that with the festival he was trying "to send a message to the world. I was trying to say something about the real Baghdad that we live in. Iraq is about more than terrorism, political problems and war on the streets. I wanted to say that we have a civilisation here, and we have culture. This place, our homeland, is not just some area marked out for war".

 The article in full is published in The Sunday Times

The film is screening at Cambridge Film Festival (6th-16th July 2006)