On 'Son of Babylon'

Son of Babylon screened at this year's Copenhagen Film Festival 2011

‘SON OF BABYLON' (2010) is a fiction film based on reality about three
weeks following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the beginning of the
Iraq War. Writer/director Mohamed Al-Daradji spent seven years on this
poetic masterpiece that touches on the timely and hypersensitive subject
of the Iraq War and the country now trying to pick itself up from
devastation and ruin.

This is a story not of war, however, but of the broken family and a lost
civilization. It is a dark road movie following a grandmother and her
grandson, Ahmed, throughout Iraq in search of her son and his father,
Ibrahim. They look everywhere in this war torn land and the more they
search and dig beneath the surface for the truth of their country in
ruin, the more dark secrets they uncover. In a land rich with history,
culture, faith and pride, and in a place where the proud hanging gardens
of Babylon once reigned, this is a country with little trace of
anything now but skeletons and sand, a land which has lost all its roots
and must be rebuilt from the beginning and alone by the son of Babylon.

When asked Mohamed about the film and its politics, he explained:

"We are using the film as a raising a campaign to help raise
awareness of the missing people of Iraq."  There are mass graves all
over Iraq with thousands of unidentified bodies. He explained that the
main protagonist in his film is not an actress but a real woman on a
crusade herself to find a missing family member that disappeared during
the war and never was found. "All the people in Son of Babylon are a
‘son of Babylon'... Ahmed, the little boy, me, everyone that is the new
generation building a new Iraq".

During a press conference I asked Mohamed: "You say that your film is
not a political film and it is more a narrative human film. Can I ask
you... Do you consider yourself to be Ahmed, the little boy then who
says in the film to his grandmother ‘I don't want to be a soldier...I
want to be a musician'?"

Mohamed replied: "Yes, I am Ahmed. A lot of things you see with Ahmed
are about me and my childhood finding out things as I grew up. So, yeah,
you can sense there is something in Ahmed that I was trying to build it
up through my childhood through my way of thinking a lot of things. I
mean, I am a filmmaker I am selfish so I am trying to portray my life
and my people. This is my view and how I see it."

Written by, Vanessa McMahon Dec 12, 2010

Read more about Son of Babylon here: http://www.filmfestival.gr/default.aspx?lang=en-US&loc=1&&page=607&newsi...

See trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbNfnnKEDmg