Expat film maker charts Baghdad's dying past
DAMASCUS -- Iraqi film director Basim Kahar says the homeland he remembers in two films set for release this month is no longer recognizable to his generation of secular artists.
"Khatoun (the Ladies)" tells the stories of 62 Iraqi actresses who left Iraq in phases, most of them after the U.S. invasion four years ago. "Ambassador in a Cafe" is about Abu Haloub, a leftist Iraqi exile who has for years been going to Rawda cafe in Damascus, and sits at the same table every day.
Kahar says this breed of artists and intellectuals, once highly respected, is becoming extinct in an Arab World which is turning more Islamic...
The U.S. invasion, he said, had ushered in a dominant political class allied to clerics who are wiping out a tradition of art and secular thought that survived even the stifling ideology of the now-deposed Baath Party under Saddam Hussein...
Baghdad is also losing diversity. Minorities, such as Christians, left in droves. Several statues of poets and other secular figures were destroyed, he says.
Violence became a common way to deal with activities deemed un-Islamic by rampaging militias and groups tied to al Qaeda.
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"Khatoun (the Ladies)" tells the stories of 62 Iraqi actresses who left Iraq in phases, most of them after the U.S. invasion four years ago. "Ambassador in a Cafe" is about Abu Haloub, a leftist Iraqi exile who has for years been going to Rawda cafe in Damascus, and sits at the same table every day.
Kahar says this breed of artists and intellectuals, once highly respected, is becoming extinct in an Arab World which is turning more Islamic...
The U.S. invasion, he said, had ushered in a dominant political class allied to clerics who are wiping out a tradition of art and secular thought that survived even the stifling ideology of the now-deposed Baath Party under Saddam Hussein...
Baghdad is also losing diversity. Minorities, such as Christians, left in droves. Several statues of poets and other secular figures were destroyed, he says.
Violence became a common way to deal with activities deemed un-Islamic by rampaging militias and groups tied to al Qaeda.