The animated documentary Flavours of Iraq delivers a vivid and powerful portrayal of French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani's childhood, focusing on his fractured family experience as the son of a prominent leftist exile. Co-directed by Léonard Cohen with Alani, the film uses stylized, expressionist animation to evoke the piercingly insistent forms of memory, with shapes and silhouettes reminiscent of cutouts. Actor Malik Zidi narrates robustly in Alani's first-person voice.
Story of exile and memory
The narrative unfolds through a loose series of flashbacks triggered by the funeral of Alani's father, a leftist Iraqi who was forced into exile due to his opposition to Saddam Hussein. Mourners from Iraq's 1970s socialist diaspora share anecdotes, while Alani adds his own reminiscences of visiting extended family in Iraq at the end of the 1980s. He recalls the madeleines of those flavours and smells of Baghdad and Falluja—the delicious taste of ice-cream and the fragrances of young men's exotic hair oil.
Double life and political critique
Alani lives a double life as a next-generation Iraqi in French exile. Later, as a French journalist in US-occupied Iraq, he becomes an exiled westerner in the Middle East, deeply alienated by Islamist extremism and angry at the US-led occupation that created conditions for toxic jihadism, represented by a ghostly caterpillar wriggling across the screen. The film is at its strongest when Alani is a child, and it is surely inspired by Marjane Satrapi's Iranian animation Persepolis. It has urgency and muscular force.
Screening details
Flavours of Iraq is at Bertha DocHouse, London from 24 July.
