The craft of tear-jerking

5. 7. 2010 / Ema Čulík

They have a letter saying that he was taken prisoner and is now in a prison 600 miles from their home. They go there, he isn't there. They check a mosque where there is a badly injured prisoner, it isn't him. Then they start going to the mass graves in search of him. He is not there. And in the end, on one of many rides which they hitched, riding next to the corpse of another woman's husband, the Grandmother dies, as they pass through the ruins of the Garden of Babylon which she had promised to show the boy.

This film was so slick. It tugged the heartstrings in perfect harmony. It was tragic, it was funny at times, it was atrocious, it was adorable. After about 40 minutes, though, I twigged what was going on. It was all too perfect. This little boy had big shiny eyes and just enough cheek to be adorable. They were given a ride by a surly van driver who riled against Saddam, said "verigud, senkju" to the American soldiers and then in Arabic called them sons of bitches. "Oh, haha! Weren't we bad," think the western audiences. The driver, begging the boy to stop tooting his father's flute, said, "Can't you play something like Michael Jackson?" "Who's he?" "The mayor of America". These jokes are obviously inserted for the amusement of westerners. Who else would be tickled by such things? We, though, find it quaint to hear the name 'Michael Jackson' stick out through a long, unintelligible stream of Arabic.

There were many perfectly orchestrated emotional scenes. Crossing a body of water on the way to the prison, the grandmother calls little Ahmed back for a wash, saying, "I don't want your father to see you dirty like this." She washes him, he cleans her face. "Granny, you're lovely." The whole plot and progression of it absolutely faithfully follows a standard 'western' structure, tension rising and falling at all the right points, exactly as we are used to.

It was an extremely well made film. Apart from the apparent plentiful budget, the actors performed impressively, it was all shot beautifully. The otherwise beautiful scenery of Iraq glides past, marred by smoke, blood and ruins. The story itself is a worthy one, the characters too. I failed to be touched though, as I know that this beauty is not genuine. It is cold and calculating. Mohamed Al-Daradji and his team filtered and distilled it all down to one perfect emotional plea to the international community.

The director himself studied his craft in the Netherlands and in the UK. The film was funded by organisations in the UK, France, Netherlands, Palestine, United Arab Emirates.. at every stage of the making of this film there were people involved from all over the world. And so it was one very impressive, large scale project. And it was very skilfully made. Not for nothing it won two awards at Berlinale -- the Amnesty International Film Award and the Peace Film Award. But these are not prizes for beauty, but for the battle for human rights.

Of course I can't condemn Al-Daradji's intentions, nor can I criticise the film for being badly made, boring, immature, misjudged or overly heavy -- it is the opposite of all these things. I can't call it convincing though, for all those reasons I mentioned above. I hate it when I know that I'm being manipulated. The film doesn't appeal to viewers just by being and by telling how things are, but consciously shows exactly the things that will jerk a tear. I can't go as far as to call this film 'propaganda' but neither can I call it art.

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