SON OF BABYLON at CPHPIX 2011

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