“All roads take me into exile, all roads take me away from Baghdad. I am looking for the borders of countries and stories of passers through. We believed our exile would be short.” – Qusas Al-Abireen

I met Koutaiba Al-Janabi on a winter evening last year in London. He told me to look out for his white hair at the train station, and indeed, his Einstein style was easy to spot from a mile away. Open and gentle, his mannerisms were pleasingly familiar, not unlike my own father or uncle, so we took our unhurried time finding the nearest open cafe (where, as expected, he refused to let me pay for our coffees), almost instinctively sharing our migrant stories as we set off.

What initially drew me to his work was a glaring absence of official records, archives and films that tell the story of what happened to the millions of Iraqis who were displaced under Saddam Hussein’s ruthless dictatorship. As if struggling to keep up with its wars, Iraq has fallen victim to the loss of its own memory, each wave of conflict veiling the last, each tale buried namelessly in a mass grave. Many people saw their family members executed in the 1980s after being targeted as dissidents under the Ba’ath Party regime, while state paranoia was intensifying during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), so they were left with little choice but to escape the country.

It was not unusual for me to sit with an Iraqi of my parents’ generation. Countless times I’d listened to our family friends over a cup of tea as they recounted episodes of interrogation at university or in prison, ensuring to make special mention of the regime’s comical incompetence, their language etched with fresh curses and metaphors coined during the Saddami era. As we sat with a generous amount of snacks between us, Koutaiba and I discussed the experience of living in the diaspora, and found ourselves sharing family stories of kidnappings, separation and exile.

In his film, Qusas Al-Abireen (or ‘Stories of Passers Through’), director Koutaiba Al-Janabi weaves a personal account that will be familiar to almost every first generation Iraqi living outside of their homeland – that of a reluctant, forced removal from a place they have loved. It is the story of a people not characteristically known to be travellers, now to become wanderers against their will.

Qusas Al-Abireen is semi-autobiographical, what Koutaiba calls a “visual diary” of his exile, taking us through both real footage and acted scenes over a period of 30 years. It is a fairly linear journey from Iraq to Budapest, but patched together like a disjointed tapestry of migration – sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes hard to decipher. Our key character trudges between anxiety and isolation, navigating dark rooms with ageing window frames, or basements with concrete floors, more than once appearing to be walking aimlessly through the dark. This exiled protagonist is played by different actors: the camera looking into a chaotic call centre where he is desperately trying to call home, or briefly lingering on a rejection letter from the Home Office.

Edited in a style akin to a horror or film noir (or perhaps a bad imitation), this film certainly doesn’t give us a sense of the migrant dream. Koutaiba acts as the film’s narrator using his own melancholic, measured, warm Iraqi Arabic for the voiceover to express a continuous longing that has surrendered to grief. It’s impossible to capture the emotion that comes with decades of exodus, so what he delivers is merely this one sentiment that has characterised his lifetime, between never-ending scenes of roads and train tracks.

In Qusas Al-Abireen, Koutaiba narrates that he bid farewell to Baghdad at the age of seventeen. He recalls how he tried to make eye contact with his countrymen as he left, but found them as expressionless as statues. “There was real fear,” he says. “When I left, very few people knew apart from my mother. When Saddam first came to power he said he would create secret police in the brain of every Iraqi and this is exactly what he did.” Koutaiba, here, refers to the Orwellian and notorious intelligence network skilfully set up by the Ba’ath Party. There was at least one spy for every household, clinic and classroom; telephones were bugged and monitored, so people could not speak freely or contact exiled family members abroad; house raids could happen at any point with penalties for those who did not have a photo of Saddam up on their living room wall.

Despite memories of dictatorship, Koutaiba unravels his nostalgia for the Baghdad he left behind in the opening sequence, with iconic palms, photos of cinemas – Sindabad, The White Cinema, Cinema Al-Nujoom – men in black dishdashas, and women in Iraqi abayas hurrying their kids along.

I ask Koutaiba about the following radio broadcast issued by the Iraqi military, its haunting crackles overshadowing the nostalgic elements of the film:

This is the day we’ve been waiting for. To prove to our country, our families and our nation, that the milk we drank from our mothers was pure.

Defending our great Iraq, our glorious Arab nation. Today is our day, our battle and our war, our tradition. Arise brothers… We have to prove that we are the sons of freedom and pureness. And they are the sons of adultery and sin.

The broadcast reverberates over unsettling music and pouring thunderstorms that occur frequently throughout the film. We see this radio, or propaganda machine, on its own elevated table – despised yet respected – next to an abandoned bookcase, an unanswered telephone and a close-up of house keys, as if the toxic words have made every member of the household disappear.

“This was the speech that announced the Iran-Iraq war,” Koutaiba explains. “It was the dirtiest war in years – the war that destroyed Iraq. Nearly one million people dead. They played this speech on and on and on, and used the radio against us.”

As I’m discussing this announcement with Koutaiba, we note that the language used by the Ba’ath Party, ‘idribuhum fauq al-a‘naaq’ (translated as both ‘hit them over their heads’ or ‘cut their throats’), is not dissimilar to the language we have seen used by Daesh in recent years.

If the words were not bad enough, the radio plays a heavier, more sinister role in Koutaiba’s life. His father had been in the Iraqi army and was executed in 1963 when Koutaiba was just a child, during the first wave of executions conducted by the Ba’ath Party as they sought quickly to consolidate their control. It was only when they switched on the radio that his mother and six siblings were faced with the shocking news.

In one extended scene, Koutaiba’s family photos appear to be strewn across the floor, what he describes as “part of his conscience”, although in reality there were very few original photos left of his family. The lack of evidence of a life before exile had always troubled my conscience too, with just a handful of polaroids surviving to tell my family history. In this harsh social and political climate, photos were often burned by the families who stayed behind, ensuring there was no trace of those who’d left in order to protect them as much as possible.

Throughout our conversation, Koutaiba compares Iraq under Saddam to Chile under Pinochet, regimes mirroring each other in their crackdowns on dissidents, disappearances and secret mass graves. “They didn’t give us my father’s body. We don’t know what happened. In these mass graves, people become just a number. I think every Iraqi family has lost somebody, whatever the reason.”

The trauma of loss and lack of closure certainly inform Koutaiba’s preferred genres. His latest fantasy / horror, filmed at the Serbian-Hungarian border, The Wooden Man, is currently in post-production and explores themes of escape and refuge. He tells me that he never imagined the growing refugee crisis would reach the point it has.

It strikes me that Koutaiba, whose name comes from the Arabic root ka-ta-ba, meaning ‘to write’ or ‘to record’, has embodied his name well. “Film is one method to reflect how we feel,” he says. “We [Iraqis] don’t appreciate our archives, we destroyed them, Saddam’s photos, everything. We have to keep them. The country needs to build a huge memorial for that period. If you don’t fix the past, you can’t build the future.”

Qusas Al-Abireen is a rare insight into the impact of exile on the Iraqi diaspora who left under Saddam’s Ba’ath government (1968-2003). Although Koutaiba never appears in front of the camera in his own deeply personal story, he leaves the door wide open for Iraqis to find themselves in the details.

Koutaiba Al-Janabi will be running a workshop titled ‘The Art of Exile: A Filmmaking Masterclass’ at the BFI Studio on Saturday 15 June, 1 to 5pm. Stories of Passers Through will be screened as part of the session. Book through the BFI website here: https://whatson.bfi.org.uk. The film was also screened at the SAFAR Film Festival last year.

Photo Credits : Koutaiba Al-Janabi