Movie “Mosul My Home” Iraq

– About NETPAC: Network for the Promotion of Asia Pacific Cinema
https://www.netpacasia.org/impact
Mosul My Home by Adalet R. Garmiany, which won the NETPAC Jury Prize at the 43rd Moscow International Film Festival in April 2021. Nina Kochelyaeva, Russian NETPAC jury member, says, “All selected films were of very high quality and told stories that would have touched the heart of every viewer. But, despite the wide selection of feature films, the jury unanimously gave preference to the documentary MOSUL, MY HOME. This artistically outstanding work uses techniques invented by the author to create additional energy for the film. Following the hero’s feet, plunging into the shadow of his image on the wall, contemplating the once prosperous, but now almost destroyed shrines, the viewer, on the one hand, touches upon the former greatness of Mosul, and on the other, realizes the monstrous consequences of the war. This documentary journey is filled with love and compassion for its city and is an eloquent manifestation of the power of art, memory and humanity.” The film is the directorial debut of Garmiany, a Sufi Dervish and an experimental artist originally from Iraqi Kurdistan.

– Russian film critic “Vadim Rutkovsky,” Moscow MKFF, Sept. 2024 

Today at Moskino Cosmos we are watching the film “Mosul My Home,” Adalet R. Garmiany, Iraq, 2021.
“A walking journey through ruins and memories a union of poetry and documentation.
Bare, wounded feet walk along the remains of Mosul, a city on the Tigris River that became the scene of fatal military actions in the twenty-first century. A man who saw this city flourishing walks through twisted houses and mutilated streets. “My life is a dream,” he says at the very beginning, a dream shrouded in fog and smoke, through which a man tries to find places that have preserved traces of his mother. The film is reality; it is a city of ruins that still smell of burning and blood. The man’s house has no roof or walls; the hospital where his mother and he himself had been kept after imprisonment now resembles a rusty dungeon; the tomb of the prophet Jonah has been wiped off the face of the earth by terrorists, and it seems that in reality there is only dust and decay. But the birds are always singing, and in the block next to the dead square, children’s voices are noisy, and the bombed-out cinema suddenly turns into a luxurious ghostly hall; memory preserves different images of the past, not only pain, war, flight… “My Home Mosul” is a radical and poetic film experiment; a version of the myth of eternal return; an attempt to make a film an analogue of tactile contact with the material environment and to physically feel the lost paradise; human feet are like a mediator. We will not see the face; we will not know the name of the hero no, it is not a secret; the narrator’s name is Mohammad Mahmud Oasim, but the name is not the point, and in the credits he is listed as an actor; our intermediary and guide through another reality, where the past meets the present. The author of “Mosul My Home,” Adalet R. Garmiany, is a Kurd with a British passport, an artist who uses cinema as one of the tools of contemporary art on par with painting, installations, and performances. In the film, where Garmiany is the director, screenwriter, producer, and composer, there is a minimum of external action and a grandiose internal energy. The first screening of “Mosul My Home” in Russia took place at the 43rd Moscow International Film Festival and brought the film a prize from the international organisation NETPAC.”