Back to Babylon (film)

Back to Babylon (Arabic: العودة إلى بابل‎, French: Retour à Babylone) is a documentary film directed by the Iraqi-French film director Abbas Fahdel.

Back to Babylon
Directed byAbbas Fahdel
Produced byAgat Films & Cie
France 5
Music bySami Kaftan
CinematographyAbbas Fahdel
Amer Alwan
Edited bySylvie Gadmer
Distributed byDoc & Co
Release date
2002
Running time
52 minutes
CountryFrance
Iraq
LanguageArabic

Synopsis

Back in his home town of Babylon after a long exile, the Iraqi-born director Abbas Fahdel asks himself: "What has become of my friends? What has life here made of them? What would life here have made of me had I not decided to follow the course of destiny elsewhere?" In his search and inquiries, his encounters with the friends of his youth, it is the situation today in Iraq that is revealed through the camera's eye: the ravages of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, the after-effects of the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War and the embargo imposed by the United Nations.

Quotes

Abbas Fahdel (voice-over): "The past, with its overwhelming splendour and its scents of paradise lost, is too painful for Iraqis to bear. I recall my father reciting the poet Al-Rissafi: "We are not masters of our miserable present / On men of a foregone age / The face of time once smiled / But on seeing us, it darkened."

See also

References


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