Orphaned children trying desperately to survive in a city wrecked by war and invasions, dictatorship and insurgency. This one-line description of Mohamed Al-Daradji’s Irkalla: Gilgamesh’s Dream, set in modern Baghdad, hit by widespread attacks, protests, bombings and violence, is enough to underscore the film’s larger, universal resonance when it comes to many politically galvanized situations the world over, most notably in Gaza. Where a place that is sitting on the bomb itself drives its young lives to the edge.
The film pivots on Chum-Chum (Youssef Husham Al-Thahabi) a homeless, nine-year-old ragpicker, deeply affected by the popular myth about the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh and his travels to the underworld of Irkalla. The story doesn’t just offer him a refuge from the immediate cares and concerns, but also gives him space to grieve his dead parents and offers hope for their reappearance. He believes that the Tigris river will lead him to the gate of Irkalla where he will finally find them. His older sister Sara (Lojin Star Naimal) is not given to such fancifulness and works in a local cabaret to make ends meet.
Their proxy guardian is the rough and tough 13-year-old Moody (Hussein Raad Zuwayr) who seems to have embraced and become one with the violence endemic to Baghdad. While collecting scrap and pickpocketing, he gets co-opted by the militia leader to infiltrate the demonstrations to film everything on the sly and, later, in a dangerous mission to bomb these very protestors. Ironically, unlike Chum-Chum who remains committed to his home despite all the hardships, Moody wants to escape to the Netherlands with Chum-Chum and Sara.
The highpoint of the film is the argumentation between the two with Moody talking about running away from “rubbish life” lived amid protests, gunshots and smoke bombs, where the bread comes without meat and it is difficult to manage something as basic as charging the mobile. Chum-Chum keeps holding on to his love for the homeland. He sees hope for the future but Moody insists that there’s nothing left for them in Baghdad anymore. “Stop dreaming. Dreamers don’t make it in Baghdad,” is the advice given to Chum-Chum.
This group of street-kids has little by way of adult supervision save the tough-talking Maryam, herself bearing wounds of a tragic past, who teaches them in an old, ramshackle double-decker turned into a mobile school. But they go to her not for education as much for the meals that they are provided.
The bristling screenplay by Al-Daradji, Karim Traidia, Shahad Ameen and Hasan Falih persistently holds the adults responsible for the plight of the children, the broken world that they have come to inherit without quite having a choice in the matter.
The film scores well in the recreation (production design by Chris Richmond and Ali Saad and sound by Olivier Laurent, Laurent Chassaigne, Roland Vajs, Haider Ali) of the streets of contemporary Baghdad, crumbling but refusing to die, brought to their knees but not willing to crumble as yet. It’s the handheld camera of Nikzat Saed, Salam Salman and Al-Daradji himself and the drone shots that keep the momentum going in the ghost town.
The resilient children in the Iraq-United Kingdom-France-United Arab Emirates-Saudi Arabia-Qatar co-production are also like the battered and bruised but eternal city of Baghdad that they belong to, surviving against all odds. They gel well together as a group and bring out the audience's empathy, the standout being Al-Thahabi as Chum-Chum and Zuwayr as Moody.
No doubt censuring the adults for bringing things to such a pass for the children is necessary. But as we move along in the narrative, things begin to turn predictable and over the top in their sentimentality and messaging. The shrillness clouds the profound core till a metaphoric finale takes things soaring to the realm of hope again amid desperation and destruction.