‘Hanging Gardens’, directed by Ahmed Yassin AL DARADJI, is like a romantic fantasy story that takes place in a fantastic space just by hearing the title. However, when confronted with the actual content on the screen, the harsh reality that is painfully harsh hits the back of the head. It is a film that shows how war destroys and destroys and destroys, and what it can destroy in the end.
The film depicts the year 2021 of Iraq, devastated by Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the US invasion of Iraq. From the first scene, the appearance of the huge garbage mountain ‘Aerial Garden’ on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, overwhelms the audience. It is heartbreaking to see a young man and a boy rummaging through a huge pile of garbage without any protective equipment and picking up recyclables.
In the ‘Aerial Garden’, garbage from Iraqis, as well as from foreign troops who have been stationed here and left, are dumped. Even bodies are found. In this dirty and dangerous place, 12-year-old ‘Assad’ and his older brother pick up useful garbage and sell them to make a living. After losing their parents during the Iraq War, they barely survive and depend on each other. It shows that in a society ravaged by war, young people and children cannot learn, work or live properly.
The older brother focuses on earning a normal livelihood by picking up plastic and scrap metal, but his younger brother Assad finds something to make money through even the US military waste that people are reluctant to do. His actions to make money are unbelievably unbelievable for a 12-year-old. Among the things Assad found were painting magazines from the US military base, as well as female dolls used as sexual instruments. The older brother rebukes Assad for this behavior and pressures him to quit, but Assad does not listen at all.
What Assad has picked up is unacceptable under conservative Islamic law, and he ignores it and engages in risky actions with a young man several years older for money. He even carefully washes, dresses, and decorates his dolls, lends them to the young men around him, and gets paid. This behavior continues over and over again, and is finally stopped when the doll disappears and is punished by the older generation of power who follow conservative laws. In the process, Assad turns away and hides even when his brother, his only blood relative, is looking for him.
The strange thing is that Assad doesn’t think of female dolls as a simple money-making tool. For a boy who has been separated from her mother prematurely and has lost the opportunity to contact other women in normal circumstances, this doll becomes the object of attachment that gives him a sense of intimacy and warmth. She doesn’t feel guilty about using dolls as a money making tool, but she also cares for them and cares for them. The boy is obsessed with her doll until the last minute of the film, even digging her grave.
The twisted and broken moral consciousness of the boy comes as a shock. It is the collapsed Iraqi society that drove this child to become like this, and it is the adults in power who started the war. The male adults in the film only beat and punish Assad, but do not look after the boy or offer a helping hand. Just thinking about how the boy in the movie will grow up to become an adult makes my heart feel heavy and guilty.
The film depicts Iraqi society, which is sexually oppressed by conservative Islamic law. Men are forbidden to see or touch any woman except their wives and daughters. Men without a woman’s family have no contact with women at all. As a result, young men who are less faithful to Islamic law secretly indulge in sex and wish to have access to Western sex products. On the other hand, the older generation punishes those who do not keep the law.
The appearance of young men queuing in long lines to use the female dolls that Assad and his friend lent, and the image of the older generation committing ‘honour killings’ to boys who conducted such a business, clearly illustrate this absurd social and cultural reality. show
Surprisingly, director Ahmed Yassin al-Daraj revealed that the film is based on a true story. At the GV held after the screening of the movie on the afternoon of the 9th, he said that he met his friend ‘Ashir’ in Iraq around 2006-2007, and met him after a long time. It was said that Asir had seen him carrying sex toys that were not imported because of the economic sanctions of the United States at the time. He also explained that Assad’s behavior in rebelling against the older generation who were strict with the law in the play shows a cultural clash between the older generation who lived under Saddam Hussein’s regime and the younger generation who grew up after the war in Iraq.
However, the director did not agree with the point that the film was ‘reinforcing the perception of patriarchal men who sexually objectify women’. He said, “I grew up with seven older sisters. Women are the object of love for me. Outside the house, I lived in a patriarchal environment, but inside the house, my relationship with women was completely different,” he said.
He added, “There are no women in this film. However, the co-writer is also a woman, and the production staff is mostly women. In fact, it is a film made by a woman.” He also emphasized, “I wanted to talk about the imbalance of women’s roles in Iraqi society, not sexual commodification. I tried to show how marginalized and isolated women are.”
On this day, the director and cinematographer said that Iraq does not currently have the infrastructure for commercial film production, so the film was shot with two cameras, two lenses, one wireless microphone, one light and one tripod. The director said, “I filmed with a focus on storytelling because there was little equipment, and I thought about using the things I had at an appropriate angle.”
For this reason, the screen of the film is a little rough and crude. However, there was not enough to revive the atmosphere of the film by concentrating on the characters’ expressions and trajectories and weaving out the devastated mountains of garbage and the houses on the outskirts of the poor city.
This problematic film with shocking content is the director’s debut. It was impressive to see the wide range of depictions of the horrors of war that destroy humanity, the sexual objectification and isolation of women in various cultures, and the conflict between generations in a chaotic society after the war in one work. The film was also submitted to the Orizonti Extra section at the Venice Film Festival.
