The Fifth Story

There's an unmistakable cloak of melancholy shrouding this consideration of Iraq's turbulent history and lingering trauma, in a documentary which offers a patchwork of experiences in modern Iraq, lent additional intensity by the incorporation of director Ahmed Abd's own childhood memories and how they have continued to affect him.

He recalls his means of escape as a child living through the 2003 Iraq War, when he drew superhero stories, but notes that then, and to a degree now, he remains dogged by the fear that time instilled in him. Fear, it seems, has become a constant companion to generations of Iraqis - growing up under wave after wave of conflict and his story is supplemented by that of a teenager, whose childhood is the most recent to be scarred by war, a young female Kurdish fighter who took up arms against ISIL, an elderly man whose poor mental health following a much older conflict has left him isolated and Abd's own father, haunted by the faces of those he had to bury on the frontline.

The driving forces of each of these conflicts are less important than their impact - the names may change but the effects are just as devastating, whether it was the war on terror, ISIL's Sinjar massacre or Saddam Hussein terrorising his own population. This is not just a tearing down of buildings and possessions but a blitzkrieg of spirit. "My life was war upon war," one says, another questions what it means to be free. Images of a broken country emerge, often captured as moving snapshots, in both senses of the phrase, and evoking a gamut of emotions. There's the shock of watching children at play, re-enacting the IS modus operandi of shooting one another in the head or seeing the teenager pull bombshells from a river bed before going into bathe and a sadness to watching the young fighters often interact as they would as young women away from war, a carefree moment in stark contrast to the weapons that they're carrying. The 2019 protests offer a moment of positive energy before we again see a country's hierarchy that turns upon its own.

Many things are broken here, but Abd also captures a sense of life going on in the face of it. The way his father channels his negative emotions into drawings or the camaraderie between the fighters in the face of danger, even the elderly man has found a cat companion - a small but obvious comfort. Abd's film offers space to consider these shards of experience, each reflecting one off the other the brutality of what each person has experienced while offering just the smallest of glimmer of hope for citizen solidarity and a future that might be different.