“I want to go back and film”: Maysoon Pachachi on A Candle for the Shabandar Café
Posted by Shohini Chaudhuri
“Creativity is a response to the ‘un-making’ of the world, when the pavement is crumbling under your feet and you no longer recognise the people around you”, says Maysoon Pachachi, a London-based Iraqi filmmaker with extensive experience of working on the frontline of war and occupation. She and her colleague Kasim Abid taught documentary filmmaking in Jerusalem, Gaza and Ramallah, before setting up the Independent Film and Television College in their native Baghdad and producing A Candle for the Shabandar Café, one of the shorts screened at Space and Memory in the War-Torn City, earlier last month. In a special interview for The Mosaic Rooms, Maysoon Pachachi tells of her experiences working in Baghdad and the background to the film.
What was the inspiration behind the film school in Baghdad?
There was one point when I was teaching in Ramallah, with tanks on the streets and curfews every night. We were inspired by how much difference it made to the students being able to actually put thoughts and feelings on the screen in a situation like that. So, in 2003, we were in Ramallah, sitting in a café having a coffee and we went, ‘OK, Iraq has been invaded and is under occupation, what can we do?’ We are not something useful, like doctors or engineers to rebuild the country. Our experience in Palestine gave us a lot of encouragement to try and do the same sort of a thing, to set up a free-of-charge school to teach basic cinema skills.
Of course, we had grand plans at the beginning but, because of the security situation, which got increasingly worse, and because of the funding, we really operated in a very minimal way and very stop-start. At one point, at the height of sectarian tension, people were getting kidnapped from the building. There was an explosion that went off nearby and the glass on the building shattered many times and the students couldn’t get in, or somebody in their families got kidnapped and killed. In fact, this is what happened to Kasim’s brother.
We’d been outside the country for a very long time, both of us, and we didn’t want to do what we saw a lot of people doing. People who lived outside went back and tried to tell the Iraqis what to do. I really didn’t want to do that. So when Kasim went back to visit his family, he started talking to people and asking if there was an interest. And people said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, come, we really need this’. Because of the sanctions, there’d been no access to digital equipment, there’d been no access to video equipment, there were no film labs. And the cameras they had were very antiquated. If something went wrong, there was no way of getting replacement parts during the sanctions, so filmmaking more or less stopped.
How did you get around the problem, which you saw elsewhere, of people from outside imposing their way of working? How did you try to enable the filmmakers to tell their own stories?
That was absolutely a pillar of the way we were working – to help them make the films they wanted to make. So they would come to us with ideas, then we would discuss with them: ‘What is the core of this film, why do you want to do it, what’s important about this, what sort of thing can actually tell a story?’ Then came the logistics, a big issue because they were shooting in dangerous circumstances. People would set up, do all the research and then suddenly that area becomes incredibly dangerous, closed off, full of checkpoints and militias, and they would have to stop and do something else. Or the central person of the film would suddenly get kidnapped or have to leave the country in 24 hours. So there was a lot of chopping and changing like that. In the end, especially in 2006, 2007, 2008, when the situation got really dangerous, they found themselves really having to work in a situation of familiarity instead of launching further out to the society, which is what they wanted to do. They would have to make something more personal, around their neighbourhood, around people that they knew and trusted, that was the truth of the situation.
Can you tell us about your involvement in A Candle for the Shabandar Cafe?
Well, it was one of the films on the 2007 documentary course. [The director] Emad Ali wanted to do a historical film about the culture of Iraq. Shabandar Café is in the old part of town, the area where the Ottomans had their headquarters and barracks. It opened in 1917, and was always the place where people came to discuss literature and politics. The whole place is redolent with the history of modern Iraq. So this is what Emad was initially making the film about. And it’s near Al-Mutanabbi Street, the street of bookshops, another institution at the heart of the culture of the city. That’s where, in 2007, a bomb went off, and the film covers that.
One night [in December 2006], a mortar fell on Emad’s house and killed his wife and his father. I mean, you can imagine he was in a terrible state. He just stopped doing everything on the film. When the bomb went off [in Al-Mutanabbi Street], which was in March, we weren’t in Iraq at the point and he rang us and said, ‘I want to go back and film’. Kasim said to him, ‘OK, be very careful’. He thought it was a good idea because it was pulling him out of his psychological collapse and depression. He told him to take a camera that would not attract anybody’s attention and to be very careful and aware of his surroundings, to shoot and get out of there. And Emad went and got some great footage for the café and what was going on. When he was leaving, he was attacked by two people with hidden faces in an unnumbered car.
We brought the students out of Iraq to Damascus to edit their films. [Due to his injuries from the attack] Emad was unable to walk and travel, so students on his course edited the film for him and it was submitted to several festivals, including the Gulf film festival in Dubai and it won a prize there. [As a result of winning a prize at Dubai] Emad was able to have his medical treatment and a month of rehabilitation there. Then he went back to Baghdad and made another film, about press freedom in Iraq. When somebody from a Dutch TV company came in 2010 and interviewed him, she said to him, ‘Why did you carry on?’ He said, ‘Because if I didn’t, they’d have won.’
The film school in Baghdad has closed, after running for ten years, but do you still have links to people from there?
Yes, I’ve got links with Emad and several other people that were there. In fact, when I was in Baghdad recently, doing some auditions for something that I am working on, the person who came and filmed the auditions was one of our students in 2010.
A Candle for the Shabandar Café was screened at Space and Memory in the War-Torn City at The Mosaic Rooms on May 18. This was the first event in the series Crisis and Creativity: A Season of Contemporary Films from and about the Arab World curated by Shohini Chaudhuri.
The next screening, Politicising Tourism in Palestine, will be held at The Mosaic Rooms on June 8, at 6.30pm. To book tickets click here.