The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture

The crew of Dancing Under Crossfire would like to thank The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture for their production prize.

see here for the list of winners this year

AFAC list

The Poster for the performance 'Crying of my Mother'

There are future dates for this performance across Europe and in Beirut in 2009. Keep checking for updates.

Trailer

FILM

Our documentary traces the movements of a dance troupe during the preparation of their performance, ‘Crying of my Mother’. We will take part in rehearsals and share stories over coffee. We will move with them as they perform in four cities, Baghdad, Amman, Damascus and Amsterdam where they now live in exile and where they work and perform today.

Three bodies in the absolute, three bodies empty with the energy to prove that the same body that is assaulted, repressed by culture, thrown in jail, chained and tortured, dumped on the street, covered with newspapers wet with blood, is the same body that forms visual war poetry and seeks to understand the multitude of human problems faced in modern Iraq, the violence, the greed and the malignity of it all.

This film is a window to the maze of the reality of the Iraqi situation and the absurd violence that takes place there. It explores a unique expression of an identity in crisis and will highlight to an audience, all too familiar with the daily images of catastrophe, a different interpretation of what it means to be Iraqi since 2003

IRAQ

It is very difficult to put our hands on all the details of Iraqi pain. It is even harder to find a key or a clue or an equal to it, at least for us. We, ‘the last generation’ have witnessed three wars, a siege and the crushing of the world’s most fierce dictator under the wheels of the world’s strongest tank. We are at the crossroads of two powers as they crash into each other. The American tank with its spectrum of a cultural system, its lifestyle and the hangman’s rope that stretches out to all those who dare step out of that one house, that one neighbourhood, that one party, that one authority, that one art. It is always hard to be at this crossroads when it is such an unstable meeting place.

Our film talks precisely about this crossroads.

IRAQIS BODIES

The absurd cruelty of the current situation in Iraq is expressed in the name, lives and performances of this contemporary dance troupe from Baghdad. This unique collection of artists was formed in 2001 and lived worked and performed in Baghdad. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003 diversity in thought and expression got harder. One of the four members was shot and the troupe decided to leave the country to wait for Iraq to return to a more tolerant country.