Our River…Our Sky
Maysoon Pachachi’s Iraqi drama is a deeply felt take on living in a war zone in 2006’s Baghdad.
Maysoon Pachachi is an Iraqi filmmaker based in London who has previously concentrated on making documentaries. Our River…Our Sky is her most ambitious work yet and finds her directing players who act out a portrait of life in Baghdad in 2006 as experienced by its ordinary citizens. Pachachi is also the writer working in conjunction with the novelist Irada Al-Jubori. They are showing us a time when the city was riven by a sectarian war and Pachachi sets her film in the week between Christmas and Eid al-Adha which that year would conclude with the execution of Saddam Hussein.
Pachachi herself has said that Our River…Our Sky was a film that she felt she had to make and when you see it that could not be more obvious. Her passionate concern feeds into the qualities that mark out this film as special. They are three in number: there’s the acute sense of authenticity in the way that Pachachi captures the atmosphere of Baghdad, the replication of that when it comes to the portrayal of the people central to the film and the heartfelt empathy with them so vividly conveyed by the filmmaker. These elements are so pronounced that they stand out as features that might have led to the film being a masterpiece. Furthermore, it's also the case that the cast all work well in this naturalistic mode, that the film is well photographed in colour and wide screen by Jonathan Bloom and that the images are expertly edited by Alexandre Donot.
With all this going for it, I am saddened to have to say that for me there is a major downside as well. It arises from the fact that Pachachi has chosen to create a film in which there are fifteen or more central characters. To some extent they know each other, but in practice this format involves combining a series of intertwined stories involving five families and Pachachi has opted to cut back and forth between them often in short fleeting scenes that lack a natural flow.
As the author of their stories Pachachi knows them well, but for most audiences jumping from one character to another, from one family to another, is likely to lead to confusion. It's easy enough to identify the pivotal figure, Sara (Darina Al Joundi), a novelist and a single mother who lives with her 8-year-old daughter Reema (Zainab Joda) and to take account too of Sara's elderly mother and her brother Yahya (Amed Hashimi). But then you have to take on board as well Mona (Labwa Arab), her mother (Siham Mustafa), her husband Kamal (Basim Hajar) and her brother Kareem (Zaydun Khalaf). Also living nearby we find the frustrated Dijla (Myriam Abbas) who lives with her brother Nabil (Sami Al-Ali) who is confined to a wheelchair and a Christian family which includes Sabiha (Badia Obaid) and her young daughter Nour. Older but still adolescent is Haider (Muslem Hassoun) whose father (Mahmoud Abu Abbas) drinks too much and then becomes abusive. Another figure prominent here is a boatman (Ali Kareem) whose occupation sometimes finds him pulling corpses out of the river but, perhaps thankfully, he has no relatives that we need to consider. However, even after listing so many characters, it has to be said that there are additional ones who appear on the sidelines and have a role to play.
It is, of course, not unknown for a film to take the form of a mosaic that provides a portrait of a particular time and place by touching on numerous characters who come and go without being part of a plot as such. That is never easy to make effective even when the people are only lightly sketched in. But with Pachachi’s film the women in particular are vividly drawn, the scenes between them especially noteworthy, so the viewer is all the keener to pick up on all the details of their families and their relationships. That makes it all the more disappointing that Pachachi seems too close to her material to realise just how difficult it is for viewers to place everything readily (if the editing of the images is fine, the screenplay itself is lacking in that respect). The constant switching around from one set-up to another does indeed make this a problem and it also has to be said that the complexity is added to by some of the characters having back stories which are suddenly referenced and sometimes confusingly so (to take just one example, we see the boy Haider and his father but there is also mention of his mother and that calls for more detail than it gets).
Our River…Our Sky is a lament over war – any war – but most such films engage with the experience of combatants while this is always about ordinary citizens living in a war zone (as such it has much in common with that fine documentary of 2019 For Sama which portrayed the life of a family in Aleppo when it was the target for Russian bombers supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad). Perhaps not coincidentally both films have a female perspective. Pachachi’s film is at heart so deeply sensitive that, being a piece with actors, one is prompted to compare it with the deeply humane works of an artist like India’s Satyajit Ray. Whatever the weaknesses here, she is totally successful when showing us how in such a situation life goes on sustained on occasion by jokes to make the unbearable bearable. Pachachi treats the constant threat of destruction and death as the background to daily life nevertheless making us feel it fully, the images largely avoiding the horrors but the related sounds telling their own unavoidable story. In a fine cast Darina Al Joundi as Sara stands out. This is a portrait of a good woman that is wholly engaging and one of the several ways in which Our River…Our Sky can be thought of as exceptional. Yet I still have to say that the film offers a narrative which all too often leaves the viewer floundering when attempting to follow it.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Darina Al Joundi, Labwa Arab, Myriam Abbas, Badia Obaid, Amed Hashimi, Zainab Joda, Zaydun Khalaf, Basim Hajar, Siham Mustafa, Sami Al-Ali, Muslem Hassoun, Mahmoud Abu Abbas, Ali Kareem, Suzan Muneam.
Dir Maysoon Pachachi, Pro Maysoon Pachachi, Talal Al-Muhanna and Alexander Ris, Screenplay Maysoon Pachachi and Irada Al-Jubori, Ph Jonathan Bloom, Pro Des Rayah Aasee, Ed Alexandre Donot, Music Mario Schneider, Costumes Rayah Aasee.
Les contes modernes/Lightburst Pictures/Linked Productions/ Oxymoron Films-Tull Stories.
117 mins. France/UK/Kuwait/Germany/Switzerland/United Arab Emirates/Lebanon/Qatar. 2021. UK Rel: 20 October 2023. Cert. 12A.
