Front line documentaries

A friend spotted that the Tafalgar Studios (within the Whitehall Theatre) was running their first cinema viewings today, namely three short films from the Independent Film and Television College of Baghdad.

So we took an hour out of work and popped along to a freezing (over-excited air-con) intimate studio theatre.

The three films were: Baghdad Days, the diary of a Kirkuk student who returns to Baghdad in 2005 looking for work, finding a place to live and generally living in the city in changing times; Hiwar, the story of Iraqi artists forming a meeting place and gallery; and Omar Is My Friend, a taxi driver and student braving checkpoints and having only daughters in a male-dominated society. I'd already seen parts of Omar on Channel 4 in their Three Minute Wonder slot.

Bearing in mind these were first attempts at documentary making by film students and therefore technically still learning the ropes - it shows - the subject matter and initial story-telling were superb. Afterwards, Maysoon Pachachi, one of the Iraqi film-makers who set up the college, di a Q&A session, in which she spoke about being a film-maker in the Middle East, and told the sadly small audience (about 20 of us) what had happened to the main characters since the documentaries were made about a year ago.

If you get a chance to see any of these, I can highly recommend them as snapshots of ordinary life in Baghdad in 2005, particularly the human side of Iraqis going out to vote for the first time. Maysoon told the audience that Al Jazeera English has just commissioned some films from her students, so wtahc this space. Sadly, the security situation has deteriorated since then, which made the films even more special.