Director Maysoon Pachachi will be present for a Q&A following the screening

Synopsis

In Dec 2006, a group of women from 5 cities in Iraq came to Damascus to take part in an extraordinary participatory photography project, called Open Shutters Iraq.

For a month they lived and worked together in a traditional courtyard house in the Old City of Damascus. They learned the basics of the photographic process and shared their life-stories of childhood, the struggle for education, loves and betrayals, births and deaths, wars, abductions, violence and acts of daily resistance. In then end, they had woven together the threads of their individual lives into a collective tissue of lived Iraqi experience.

They then returned to Iraq and, under extremely difficult and often dangerous circumstances, shot photo-stories, which expressed, in an evocative, deeply personal way, how they felt about what was happening around them. Back in Syria two months later, they edited their photo-stories. This films gives an insight into the lives of diverse Iraqi women who have found ways to creatively express this moment of their lives and country.

Biography

Maysoon Pachachi is a London-based filmmaker of Iraqi origin. Her documentaries include the prize-winning IRANIAN JOURNEY, BITTER WATER, and RETURN TO THE LAND OF WONDERS. She has taught film directing and editing in Britain and Palestine and is a founding member of ACT TOGETHER: Women’s Action for Iraq (www.acttogether.org). In 2004, with Kasim Abid, she co-founded INDEPENDENT FILM & TELEVISION COLLEGE, a free-of-charge film-training centre in Baghdad (www.iftvc.org), where students have so far completed 11 films.

Plus Short: Capturing the War

The story behind the 50,000 Reuters photographs taken since the invasion of the country five years ago, which have been flown from Baghdad to London to form an online project chronicling the war.

• Director: May Abdalla
• 3 min, 2008, UK
• Language: English
• Documentary