Correlations with the road movie genre can be found in works of literature dating back to Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and indeed the holy books of the three monolithic religions. For travel, the change in circumstances and the unfamiliarity of the space are in a sense the catalysts for actions, reactions, thoughts and the unsettling of the equilibrium that many a screen writing guru has preached as being the essence of character arc.
By their nature, road movies are as much about the change in the terrain and space through which the story unfolds as they are about the transformation that characters undergo en route to their supposed destination.
Comfort, contentment and undisturbed bliss are, to oversimplify, toxic for character development. There must to be a need - a lack - that is at the heart of the character's existence.
In Koutaiba al-Janabi's Leaving Baghdad (UK/Iraq, 2010), we immediately encounter the lack of Sadik (played by Sadik al-Attar): at the most basic level, he lacks a home or a country that would take him in. He is an Iraqi refugee, seemingly, en route through eastern Europe to the UK.
The road element of the story is not so much about travelling to a place, as it is about the alien nature of the locale in which Sadik finds himself. The cold climate, and the freezing temperament of the land that is most felt by the uprooted character are thrown into relief as al-Janabi's camera follows the hero wandering aimlessly through an urban landscape to the architecture and history of which he is as oblivious as it is to his existence.
The transient, transit, and distracted prism through which Sadik views this foreign land acts as a factor that draws the viewer further into the one regular element on the screen - the character and his story.
Sadik, we learn, is most encumbered by his past and by the circumstances that propelled him into becoming an addition to the millions of Iraqis who have found themselves taking refuge in nations near and far from their homeland.
Through the narrating device of letters written to his son, Sadik seems to relate, primarily to himself, episodes in the father-son relationship that is thrown into extremes by the "patriarchal" figure of the dictator. For as with any dictatorship, there is an element of the father, the lover, the elder brother in which the propaganda of the regime moulds the relationship of the despot with the nation. The dictator seems to compete with the family and the dearest ones for attention.
Iraqis would recount the nature of the "partnership" they had with Saddam Hussein in terms that are a blend of adjectives and nouns that mirror the ubiquity and omnipresence with which their relationship with him was mediated.
This aspect of the relationship with Saddam Hussein is amplified in Leaving Baghdad, as rather than the interaction being filtered and, perhaps, conducted at the level of an idea, an image, a mental construct, it is one which is first hand and immediate. For Sadik is the former personal photographer and videographer of the president. In an echo of Orwell's 1984, he is part of the state apparatus that creates, writes and re-writes the nation's narrative according to the evolving position of the ruling party.
Indeed, we are allowed a glimpse of the very images that Sadik's real-life counterparts captured from Saddam's Iraq: a birthday party for the president's youngest daughter held with a relatively small group of family and friends. The images of the little girl kissing her father quickly give way to a more shaky, unstable, and terrifying scene.
Middle-aged men, bare-chested, holding thick rubber whips, stand in the middle of an empty, bare and well-lit room. A man walks into their midst. He is tall, twenty-something and well dressed. They seem to be chatting about something. We are unable to hear their exchange, but the whole scene fills us with dread.
When the thick rubber whips begin to lash the young man's crouching body, the brutality of the beatings is made even more disturbing by the business-like, routine, non-emotional features of the men as they rhythmically raise and crush their whips against the young man's flesh and bones.
The images, we begin to realise, are part of a collection of tapes that Sadik carries with him, like a scribe travelling the earth with fragments of a nation's history.
Looking through these images becomes part of the many incarnations of the search that is at the heart of this road movie - the search for a way to get to London; the search for a refuge from the cold; for someone to talk to; the search for an understanding between husband and wife, and for a closure to a narrative that involves Sadik, his wife, their son and the "Great Leader". All of these intentionally discordant elements arrive with the story at an ending that is as open and moving as the freeze frame in Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (France, 1959).
Rather than the torture scenes that punctuate the narrative, or the episodes that depict Sadik's bewilderment and sense of loss in these foreign lands, what this viewer remembers most from Leaving Baghdad is those scenes of Sadik momentarily forgetting his refugee, wary and wandering self, to return to being a father showing total strangers a photograph of his son. Most movingly, he hands the black and white portrait to a woman with whom he shares a park bench. The fact that he doesn't speak her language, nor she his, makes the universal element of the scene most poignant: a father showing off his pride and joy.
A brave and touching debut feature from writer-director Koutaiba al-Janabi that's made this viewer impatient for al-Janabi's next project.