Kuwait’s first film on Iraq invasion to make local debut – Berlin fest offers dark vision of E. European ‘drift’

This news has been read 7089 times!

KUWAIT CITY, Feb 21, (AFP): Kuwaiti cinemas on Thursday will launch public screenings of “Swarm of Doves”, the Gulf state’s first feature-length film about the 1990 invasion of the Gulf state by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The film is “inspired by true events” that occurred during the seven-month occupation, producer Sheikha Intisar Salem Al-Ali Al-Sabah told AFP during a screening for the press.

“These are stories of people who defended Kuwait at that time,” Sabah said.

She said “the aim of the film is not to create any grudge but to highlight the brotherhood, tolerance and unity Kuwaitis experienced during the invasion”.

The film, directed by Ramadan Khasrouh and on the festival circuit since 2017, highlights moments of humanity that transcended the conflict between Iraq and its tiny, oil-rich neighbour.

In one scene, an Iraqi soldier is ordered by his commander to kill a Kuwaiti but he refuses after remembering words from his father during childhood about the bonds between the Kuwaiti and Iraqi peoples.

Another scene shows a Kuwaiti resistance fighter who forgives an Iraqi soldier during an armed confrontation, prompting the soldier to offer the man an escape from the army siege around his house.

“The film does not bear any ill will to the Iraqi people,” actor Daoud Hussein told AFP.

“The director and screenwriter made sure this film doesn’t put salt on the wound,” said Hussein, who plays the film’s protagonist resisting the invasion.

Kuwait earlier this month hosted an international conference for the reconstruction of Iraq, which is reeling from a three-year war to defeat the Islamic State jihadist group.

The conference succeeded in raising $30 billion in loans, investment and financing for Baghdad to begin the gargantuan task of rebuilding.

Kuwait’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Khaled al-Jarallah, said his country had overcome “past wounds” and had a “moral, humanitarian and Arab” duty to support its neighbour.

This week’s Berlin Film Festival is turning a wary eye eastward with a series of new movies spotlighting the rise of violent extremism and anti-migrant sentiment in the ex-communist bloc.

The filmmakers show a region at a crossroads, divided between old loyalties to authoritarian Russia and forces trying to avert a drift away from the European Union and the West.

“They’re isolated, don’t want to share anything with other countries, they reject liberal values — this is the vision which is gaining strength in former communist countries,” said Czech director Jan Gebert, who presented “When the War Comes”, a chilling documentary about a Slovak paramilitary group.

For three years, from 2015 to 2018, the 37-year-old filmed the rise of “Slovak Recruits” (Slovenski Branci), one of the country’s leading far-right organisations.

The militia was founded in 2012 by Peter Svrcek, a then 20-year-old archaeology student, who drew up to 200 young middle-class men to join him in the woods and undergo weapons training on the sidelines of their “civilian” lives.

The guns they use have been disabled but feel real in the clenched fists of the weekend warriors.

Their ideology glorifies “Slavic blood”, ultranationalism, hatred of refugees and foreigners, rejection of Europe and its values and a desire for a strong state on the model of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Migrants

Their goal? To halt the “invasion” of migrants, fight against “evil” and cure a “sick Slovak society”, Gebert said.

“It looks like Europe has to take moral lessons again,” said Arpad Bogdan, a 37-year-old Hungarian director of Roma origin, who premiered his second feature film “Genesis”.

The poignant movie focuses on a series of vicious racist attacks against Roma people in 2008-09 in Hungary in which six people including a child were killed.

“Genesis” examines how a tragedy targeting a minority contributes to a rot that is penetrating the entire society.

The film is inspired by events in Hungary but “it is not a Hungarian film”, Bogdan told AFP, because the violence and “evil” shown in “Genesis” have infected many parts of Europe.

This includes countries in the west of the continent, he said, such as Germany, where attacks against asylum seekers spiked at the height of the refugee influx in 2015-16.

“A lot of disturbing things are happening in Europe,” the Hungarian director sighed, lamenting the populist, anti-migrant course charted by Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary since 2010.

Gebert said much of eastern Europe was gripped by an “atmosphere of fear”, with deep anxiety about “terrorism, migration, Brexit, crisis in the EU, war in Ukraine” all feeding the rise of openly xenophobic political movements.

This news has been read 7089 times!