EUROPEAN PREMIERE Screening: Iraq, My Home – Your War

Shot in Baghdad over three years and taking in the period before, during and after the coalition attack, Iraq, My Home – Your War is a remarkable account of the effect of the turmoil on one Iraqi family as it deals with the disruption and terror.

Forty-year-old Layla Hasan, her husband and teenage son, live in the Baghdad district of Adhamiya, the heartland of Sunni Muslim resistance to the US forces. Striking and intelligent, Layla speaks four languages. She had had little choice when she was hand-picked to work as a translator for Saddam’s regime. When the US forces arrived she hoped they might offer a path to freedom. Yet now the war is tearing apart her most intimate relationships.

We meet her shy teenage son, who she suspects is working with the resistance; her steady workaholic husband; and her once radical sister who is becoming increasingly conservative and religious as the chaos in Baghdad intensifies. Layla, herself, becomes ever more isolated as the war progresses and she dreams of escaping abroad.

The milestones of the turbulent recent years in Iraq – the invasion, the looting, the capture of Saddam and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal – are seen from the perspective of a Sunni Muslim family living through these terrible times.

My Home, Your War is not only an important contemporary historical document. It is also a personal account of how turbulent times are playing out in people’s lives and how Iraqi women have become the first casualties of a democracy denied.

Winner: Gold Medal – New York Film and Video Festival
Winner: Australian Media Awards – 2 Categories

Director/Producer/Writer: Kylie Grey
Executive Producer: Chantal Denoux
Editor: Matthew Walker
Length: 52 Mins