A Film a Week: Irkalla: Gilgamesh's Dream / Irkalla Hulm Jijiljamish

 previously published on Cineuropa

In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Irkalla is the underworld inhabited by the dead, the demons and the deities. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the titular hero visited Irkalla on one of his missions. There is a theory concerning the lost, last tablet of the epic describing the hero’s second journey to the underworld. This serves as the source of Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji’s newest feature, Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream, which has just premiered in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.

Baghdad, 2019. The clashes between the police, protesters and different militias, often with terrorist agendas, create chaos on the streets. Everybody has lost somebody over the decades of wars and dictatorship. Our hero, Chum-Chum (Yussef Husham Al-Thahabi), is a sweet nine-year-old orphan who lives in a makeshift settlement of abandoned boats and barges on the Tigris River. For him, the epic of Gilgamesh, seen as an animated series on tapes on the school bus, is real, and the Tigris serves as the gateway to Irkalla, where he hopes to meet his dead parents. He even sees an elderly fisherman (Ahmed Layo) as Gilgamesh, his potential guide to the underworld.

The commune of homeless kids is run by a streetwise young hoodlum, Moody (Hussein Raad Zuwayr), who wants to earn enough money to take himself, Chum-Chum and Chum-Chum’s sister Sarah (Lojin Star Naima), whom he takes a romantic interest in, to the Netherlands. To achieve this, Moody does not shy away from anything – from collecting scrap metal for recycling to pickpocketing and performing missions for the militia run by the mysterious Sheikh (Jabaar Al-Janabii). What starts out as spying on and filming the routines of the kids’ teacher Mariam (Samar Kadhim Jawad) soon morphs into something more dangerous and ethically dubious. Is there a way for Chum-Chum to survive and stay pure in this dirty, perilous world?

Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream is a film for a specific target audience – youngsters over 14 years of age – and, as such, does a rare thing in portraying the street life of Baghdad from a child’s perspective, which at times seems very grim and down to earth and, at other times, naive with a hint of fantasy to it. And Al-Daradji manages to achieve this by getting the audience to feel empathy for his characters’ actions and causes. Ultimately, he points out the universal truth that hurt people hurt people, but he does so with a sense of authenticity.

The style of the film is suitable for its audience, but not exactly groundbreaking, as the filmmaker opts for a combination of handheld camerawork and drone shots of the city and the ongoing chaos there. The animations of Chum-Chum’s fantasies are a nice touch, however. In the acting department, allowances should be made for every individual performance, since the cast members’ experience in performing is extremely limited. Also, the melancholic orchestral music by Mike and Fabien Kourtzer is sometimes overly on the nose in its attempt to get us to feel a maximum of emotion. The script by Al-Daradji and Karim Traidia, with co-writers Shahad Ameen and Hasan Falih as “helping hands”, becomes problematic as well, as it gets predictable once the exposition is over and done with.

So, Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream will not score any extra points for originality or subtlety, but with movies for younger audiences, this is not the main goal, after all. Nonetheless, it is an authentic, and symbolically and emotionally potent movie.

A Film a Week - May Labour Day / Praznik rada

 previously published on Cineuropa

Back in the early 2000s, Pjer Žalica was probably the hottest and most bankable filmmaker from Bosnia and Herzegovina thanks to his first two features, Fuse (2003) and Days and Hours (2004). After this promising start, his career started to show signs of ups and downs, with some documentary passion projects, productions that fell through, an adaptation of a stage play into a script for Elmir Jukić’s film The Frog and a piece of filmed theatre, Focus, Grandma!, which opened the 2020 (pandemic) edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival. The festival still holds Žalica in high regard, placing the premiere of his newest effort, May Labour Day, in the closing-film slot, meaning that it played simultaneously in multiple open-air venues at Sarajevo.

The title comes from the International Workers’ Day holiday, the celebration of which was introduced in Yugoslavia in communist times. The tradition of celebrating the holiday in large groups with vast quantities of food has continued in all of the former federal republics, now independent states. And the ensemble of middle-aged and elderly friends at the centre of Žalica’s film is no exception to that rule.

However, the plans of Numo (Admir Glamočak), Mujke (Aleksandar Seksan), Žuna (Emir Hadžihafizbegović), Cijo (Ermin Bravo), their former neighbour Savo (Boris Isaković), now visiting from Canada, and to a lesser extent their wives are interrupted when their neighbour, friend and war comrade Fudo gets arrested by the special forces on war-crime charges. The situation gets even more complicated when Fudo’s unassuming son Armin (Muhamed Hadžović) comes for an unannounced visit, also bringing his pregnant wife, Diba (Labina Mitevska), insisting that he has to do his own investigation in order to clear his father’s name before it is too late. As the alcohol flows and the conversations get more and more heated, old wounds and resentment from the war in the early 1990s resurface, threatening to ruin not only the celebration, but also their friendship and communal spirit.

Žalica’s script falls into the trap of inflating the characters and the relations between them, which makes it more suitable for a stage play than for cinema, and his directing is not overly innovative either. The filmmaker makes good use of the slick cinematography by Almir Đikoli and the acting abilities of his cast of Bosnian and ex-Yugoslav A-listers, leaving them enough space for some theatrics and bravado without ruining the sense of continuity or realism in their performances, but he also uses clichéd tricks such as steering the viewers’ emotions through Dino Šukalo’s score. But the biggest issue is probably the fact that Žalica serves as his own editor, so any chance of cutting corners to make the film a bit leaner and more propulsive was sacrificed in order for the filmmaker to keep full control.

If Žalica’s only intention were to point out that this war from 30 years ago still dictates the lives of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one could call May Labour Day a success. The trouble is that Žalica does not bring anything particularly new to the table, since this is common knowledge both in the country and abroad. If it had come some 15 years earlier, the film would have been a good companion piece to the filmmaker’s early works, but nowadays, it seems fairly anachronistic, in terms of both its topic and its execution.