User Reviews

BACK TO BABYLON is a road movie, a trip through Iraq which leads us to meet a few people, taking the time to be close to them. Each encounter reveals a new novel. And we discover how Iraqi people survive daily, with an incredible strength for life, that enables them to bear the harshness of the materials conditions. The film is also a tender story about friendship and a life affirming film, very natural and above all, humane. It might primary be a story about lost childhood, but it's also about time. Everything changes, nothing can be as it is forever. All of these things might sound portentous and heavy handed, but Fahdel never forces the issues or labours the point. His film begins with a beautiful song: "I've traveled / I've changed / And at the end of my life, lost / I've discovered the value of my own." The film ends with another song: "You can go to the end of the Earth / only your homeland will be a haven / So think carefully, poor man / When you're dead / who'll be at your side?" Between the two songs, we witness the journey of the filmmaker in his native country. As he move from town to town (Babylon, Baghdad, Hīt), the feeling of his homeland's decay is quite palpable. Bound by his past, where he is from, Fahdel enjoy the company of his childhood friends, until they must part. Their encounters are filmed in real time, and if the journey may be of little consequence, the filmmaker's acute eyes and ears for detail make it one well worth taking.

You can't go home again. Well, everyone knows that, but some prodigal sons can't help trying. The director/narrator of "Retour à Babylone" is one of them. Feeling the call of the homeland, he confesses at the beginning of his film: "The time has become to make peace with that part of myself that remained attached to my homeland and the childhood friends I left behind". Then, as if he has a mission to accomplish, he returns to his devastated country, Iraq, and more precisely in his hometown of Babylon, city of ancient Mesopotamia. Haunted by the guilt often felt by survivors, he goes in search of his childhood friends, and thus discovers that several of them have disappeared during the Iraq-Iran war and the Gulf War, while the survivors have been all ruined by the international embargo against Iraq. In addition to being an emotional testimony about a wretched country, the Proustian pilgrimage of Abbas Fahdel to his homeland has a real poetic and universal value which makes it very interesting to watch.