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