BAGHDAD: As Baghdad writhed with violence in 2006, Emad Ali set out to make a film about the iconic Shabandar Cafe. But he turned the camera on himself after the teahouse was bombed, a deadly mortar killed his wife and a gunman shot him three times. Despite the ordeals, he finished “A candle for the Shabandar Cafe,” screening it for the first time in Iraq at this month's Documentary Film Festival in Baghdad, organised by the capital's struggling, non-governmental Independent Film and Television College to showcase student films made between 2004 and this year. The films are without a common theme: A young woman arrives in violence-torn Baghdad to finish college; a gentle surgeon with literary talents struggles at an understaffed hospital; an academic moonlights as a barber; a singer refuses to quit music despite threats by Islamists. But through the lives of ordinary people, the 16 documentaries capture all the plagues visited on Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein: a vicious Al-Qaeda insurgency; abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers; sectarian violence that killed tens of thousands; and ethnic divisions that turned friends into enemies. “We wanted to show what it feels like to be an Iraqi, to capture a portion of Iraq's ongoing history,” said Kasim Abid, 60, who returned from Britain in 2003 and began the tuition-free college the year after with fellow Iraqi and filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi. In March 2007, a suicide bombing killed more than 30 people and wounded at least 60 in Baghdad's renowned Mutannabi street, destroying the centenarian Shabandar Cafe. Before the attack, Emad Ali had finished filming faded pictures of old Baghdad on the cafe walls, an ancient radio on the mantle and a withered manager tapping out customers' bills on a clunky typewriter. He stopped filming after his wife and father died in a mortar attack on their home. Violence was rampant and often random when he resumed after several months, and he was returning from filming one day when a gunman shot him in the chest, back and leg. Ali turned the camera on himself, capturing just another victim of another day in Baghdad. “A creative person dies when he stops creating, that's why I continued,” a healed Ali said on the sidelines of the two-day film festival. Violence in Iraq now has dropped, although kidnappings and bombings still happen nearly every day. American forces have retreated to their bases, largely invisible on the streets, ahead of a pullout at year's end.
