Synopsis
Latif Al-Ani’s photography has sometimes been compared to that of Robert Doisneau. It’s true that, in the tenderness of his portraits and the lushness of his landscapes, there is a kind of Eastern humanism, and a form of nostalgia. But if it is true that every photograph becomes a trace of the past the moment it is taken, here we are, quite literally, confronted with the vertigo of an annihilated world.
These images of a prosperous, happy Iraq, the remnants of this Garden of Eden, the cradle of an age-old civilization, were all made before the deluge. The unrelenting disasters of the twentieth century, dictators, neo-colonial invaders hungry for oil, have left nothing there but ruins.
The power of this magnificent film lies in having brought back to life all that has been lost, through a pilgrimage in the company of the photographer and his memory. This beauty, no doubt invisible today, is preserved forever, thanks to photography, in a time capsule that asks only to be reopened. Photographic testimony is also a way of preserving and resisting. Today, Latif al-Ani is no longer with us; he has rejoined all that he had lost, and he has left us beauty as an inheritance.
What you will find in this film
A humanist photograph • A living memory • A pre-war memory • The nostalgia of a lost world • A photograph of happy days.
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The authors/artists
Further exploration
This content is for members only.
Tamara Chalabi & Morad Montazami – Latif Al-Ani, Hatje Cantz, 2017.
Pedro Azara (ed.) – Through the Lens: Latif Al-Ani’s Visions of Ancient Iraq, Princeton University Press, 2023.
Arbella Bet-Shlimon – City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk, Stanford University Press, 2019. .
Mona Damluji – Pipeline Cinema: The Cultural Infrastructure of Oil Extraction in Iran and Iraq, University of California Press (Luminos), 2025.
Yuri Kozyrev – Inside Iraq, CDP Éditions, 2008.
Rolleiflex 6x6 twin-lens reflex
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