Flavors of Iraq review – fond memories of childhood in 80s Baghdad from a writer in exile in Paris | Movie

WWith a title that was irreverently translated from Le Parfum d’Irak to “Iraqi perfumes” when “Iraqi perfumes” would have been simpler and better, the film is a powerful, vivid animation directed by Léonard Cohen and its author, the French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, boldly told in Maliperson’s Alanis ‘Alanis a Zilani. Video formats are replaced by styles: shapes and forms such as silhouette cutouts suggest colors that stimulate memory.

It’s about Alani’s childhood and family struggles growing up in Paris in the 80s as the son of a prominent Iraqi man who was exiled from his country for dissent. Saddam Hussein. The story is told through flashbacks from his father’s funeral, where the mourners, members of Iraq in the 1970s who were torn apart by his death, begin to tell stories. To this, Alani adds his memory of returning to visit his extended family in Iraq in the late 80s, and encountering the madeleines of those spices and the smell of Baghdad and Falluja: the sweet taste of ice cream and the smell of strange hair oils for boys.

Alani lives a superficial life as the next generation of Iraqis in French exile – and then, when he arrives in Iraq occupied by the US as a French journalist, he is a Western outsider in the Middle East, far from the Islamic terrorist group and angry at the US-led operation that has created the phenomenon of this dangerous jihadism (represented by the eagle). Perhaps inevitably, the film is most powerful when Alani is a child, and the film is certainly inspired by The Iranian animation Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. It has a fast and powerful energy.