I discovered a masterpiece along the way my darlings… If there is any way for you to get your hands on a copy of this film (www.imarabe.org), Al Thamioun really is a treasure in our cinematic history in my humble opinion: The script as well as the cinematography moved me like no other film that I saw during the festival. Directed by Mohamed Shukri Jameel, the film stars Dr. Saadi Younis, Sami Kaftan and Khalil Shawqi and was released in 1972.

The film is set somewhere in the rural landscape of southern Iraq and tells the tale of a Bedouin community that suffers a dry spell in their neck of the desert. The lack of water wreaks havoc on their livestock and crops and puts a strain on interpersonal relationships. The main protagonists are Abu Someone (I’m really sorry people I just can’t remember the name for the life of me) and his son Someone: Two characters that represent good, truth and honor in the story as they courageously set out to save their community by embarking on a seemingly futile mission to dig up fresh water from the ground. (I have to mention in passing that Khalil Shawqi and Saadi Younis’ performances in this movie are riveting to say the least) Meanwhile the antagonist, a conniving tribesman very convincingly played by Sami Kaftan, begins to plant a seed of discord within the group by mocking the father/son duo for what he sees as a pointless effort and goes around trying to convince everyone to abandon their way of life and head for the big city: Baghdad. Abu Whoever and his son finally do unearth water but to there dismay it is salty… I loved this part as it scored high on the drama scale (although the whole film is more tragic than all Egyptian and Bollywood films put together): The gut-wrenching music, the excessive close-ups, and of course the overacting at this point were just splendid to watch. But that doesn’t stop the two from trying again… Meanwhile the drought is beginning to cause more and more problems between the characters and surprisingly, the film, albeit in a symbolic way, explores among other things issues of power, sex, marriage, love and betrayal.

The drought and its consequences on the social level can easily be interpreted as a metaphor for war, an economic crisis or any other kind of disaster that might strike a nation. At first sight Al Thamioun is a simple story of what could happen to a small community of people that have to deal with a natural disaster, but on so many other levels it spoke to me about politics, society and the innately flawed nature of mankind. By the end of the movie I found myself tearing as I thought of our beautiful Iraq and how the film was just a slice of life of what’s been going down in the motherland for decades now.

At the end of the film the modest but substantial group of people in the theatre got up for a standing ovation and I was delighted to discover that a lot of the main actors were actually present. I had the honor of meeting Mr. Sami Kaftan, Khalil Shawqi’s daughter May (who also acted in the film) and the most charming Dr. Saadi Younis, who lives in Paris and continues to produce plays and publish poetry about Iraq in English, Arabic and French.