Iraq war has driven away all secular artists
May 1st, 2007 by Zsofia
Following the recent release of two of his new films, Iraqi documentary film director Basim Kahar says Iraq today is no longer recognisable to his generation of secular artists.
“Khatoun (the Ladies)” tells the stories of 62 Iraqi actresses who left Iraq in phases, most of them after the US invasion four years ago, while “Ambassador in a Cafe” is about Abu Haloub, a leftist Iraqi exile who has for years been going to Rawda cafe in Damascus, and sits at the same table every day. Kahar says this breed of artists and intellectuals, once highly respected, is becoming extinct in an Arab World which is turning more Islamic.
“Baghdad has become wrapped in a turban and wearing a beard,” Kahar told Reuters. “Abu Haloub and the 62 actresses who represented Iraqi femininity and joy in theatre, cinema and television do not belong to the ‘new Iraq’.” The US invasion, he said, had ushered in a dominant political class allied to clerics who are wiping out a tradition of art and secular thought that survived even the stifling ideology of the now-deposed Baath Party under Saddam Hussein.
Read more of this Reuters article here.
