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A Flood in Baath Country

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A Flood in Baath Country
طوفان في بلد البعث
Déluge au Pays du Baas
Original French release poster
Directed byOmar Amiralay
Produced byARTE France - AMI'P
Narrated byOmar Amiralay
CinematographyMeyar Roumi
Edited byChantal Piquet
Distributed byAMIP
Release date
  • 2003 (2003)
Running time
48 minutes
CountrySyria
LanguagesArabic, French and English subtitles

A Flood in Baath Country (Arabic: فيلم محاولة عن سد الفرات, romanized: Toufan fi Balad al-Baath) is a Syrian documentary film by the director Omar Amiralay, released in 2003 and premiered in 2004 at the Beirut Cinema Days Festival. The film, Amiralay's last, criticizes the Baa'thist regime in Syria, particularly the Tabqa Dam construction project and the party's impact on political life and education in the country. In A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay repurposes footage from his first film to criticize his early enthusiasm for the Ba'ath Party. Though banned in Syria like most of Amiralay's films, A Flood in Baath Country was readily available domestically on pirate DVD. It won the award for the best short film at the 2004 Biennale des films arabes in Paris.

Background

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The construction of the Tabqa Dam led to the submerging of villages under Lake Assad

In his first film, 1970's Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam, Amiralay had supportively documented the Ba'ath Party's construction of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates. In the river's damming, Lake Assad was formed as the dam's reservoir, flooding archaeologically important villages and displacing their tribal inhabitants.[1] New settlements around the reservoir were constructed for the displaced villagers. Over thirty years of Ba'ath rule later, A Flood in Baath Country strongly criticizes the regime and the dam. For the film, Amiralay visited Busha'ban tribespeople who were displaced by the dam's construction, and repurposed footage from Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam to criticize his young enthusiasm for the party, for which he felt "deep shame".[2][3][4][5] As Neil MacFarquhar reports, Amiralay wanted to "atone" and to "expose government propaganda for what it is".[6] In a 2008 interview, Amiralay explained his return to Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam: "Wanting to criticize the Ba'ath regime, I am actually able to start with self-criticism by admitting that at one point I made a film to glorify the Euphrates dam. Today, having revisited it, I can explore its catastrophic effects—and integrity requires that I include myself in the criticism."[7]

When doing research for A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay came to believe that the dam was not constructed to generate power, but to protect the regime from the possibility that Turkey would restrict Syria's water supply. "The thing that angered me the most," Amiralay said to film critic Lawrence Wright, "is that I learned that [the site submerged by Lake Assad] was the place where human beings became farmers for the first time, and left the hunting-and-gathering stage, eleven thousand years before Christ."[1]

Amiralay was inspired to make the film after being given "courage" from witnessing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, saying: "When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next".[6] The film's working title was Fifteen reasons why I hate the Baath Party.[8][6] Speaking to Lawrence Wright, Amiralay described the film's working concept: "I wanted to make a film of fifteen shots, which are the fifteen reasons I hate the Baath Party. The last reason was that I hate myself, for having been obliged to make a film for them. They spoiled forty years of my life."[1]

Content

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At the beginning of A Flood in Baath Country Amiralay speaks over footage from Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam about his "distress" at having made it; about a report that all the early Ba'ath-constructed dams were at risk of collapsing like the Zeyzoun had in 2002;[9] and of the dam's reservoir, Lake Assad, as a symbol for the regime, "submerg[ing] all life in Syria".[10]

The documentary depicts extreme poverty in Syria[11] and the Ba'ath Party's "unforgiving absolute dominion over Syrian political life".[12] In footage from a rural village elementary school, whose headmaster is the nephew of a local Ba'ath Party leader,[10] children rotely mouth and chant Baath slogans in praise of the president, such as "We are the voice of the proletariat. In sacrifice, we eat little."[2][13] They also read from a Ba'athist textbook praising the Tabqa Dam's construction, reading: "On the fifth of July, the Euphrates River joined a new school to learn how to read and write and to fall in love with the fields and the trees in a modern way. At the school's door, President Hafez al-Assad removed the river's muddy cloak, trimmed his unkempt hair, cut his long nails and gave him a green-ink pen and a notebook to write his diaries as a civilised river… Al-Assad proclaimed as he changed the course of the river that the Euphrates Dam constructed by the Baath is not an engineering work for Syria alone; it is a pan-Arab one and that Palestine has its share."[9]

In the documentary, Shaykh Diab al-Mashi, a former leader of the Busha'ban tribe,[12] admits that he'd sent his tribesmen to Aleppo in the 1970s to assist in President Hafez al-Assad's fight against the Muslim Brotherhood.[14] As a reward, al-Mashi was granted a permanent seat in the Syrian Parliament.[15] His tribe's villages were also provided with electricity, and many of the men were exempted from compulsory military service.[16] The school’s village, al-Mashi, is named after the parliamentarian.[9][6]

The film employs long shots and close-ups, in contrast to the "unusual cinematic punctuations" including freeze-frames, repeated motifs, and distorted angles used in Amiralay's earlier Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974). Samirah Alkassim writes that A Flood in Baath Country "shows water to be an allegory for policies of erasure that require the people’s indoctrination to ensure their compliance".[17] According to Enab Baladi, the film's slow and silent shots reflect the stagnation and monotony of life in the villages around the reservoir.[18]

Release and reception

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The film was released in 2003[10] and had its premiere in 2004 at the Beirut Cinema Days Festival.[19] It also played at the 2004 Biennale des films arabes in Paris, where it won the award for best short film.[20][21][22] The jury of the 2005 Munich DOK.FEST's Horizons Award gave the film a special mention.[23] Following political pressure, A Flood in Baath Country was pulled from the lineup of the 2004 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia. 53 film directors criticized the decision in an open letter to the festival's director Nadia Attia,[19][24] and a number of filmmakers withdrew their submissions to the festival in protest, including Yousry Nasrallah, Annemarie Jacir, Nizar Hassan, Danielle Arbid, Joana Hadjithomas, and Khalil Joreige.[25][26][27] Attia relented and re-admitted the film to be shown a single time, outside of official competition and on the final day of the festival.[27][28] Jeune Afrique reported that the allegation that the film had been pulled to begin with was just an unfounded rumor.[21] A Flood in Baath Country had its North American premiere at the 2005 Tribeca Festival, where it was shown alongside Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam.[29][30]

A Flood in Baath Country was banned from release in Syria,[2] but Amiralay released the documentary to film pirates, and "[t]wo months later, everybody in Damascus had seen it. It was a digital flood."[1][31] James Bennett wrote in 2005 that he had seen the film, "like everyone else [in Syria]", on DVD despite the censorship. In an interview with Bennett, Amiralay said that an Arab satellite network had bought the rights to broadcast the film, and since Bashar al-Assad had recently permitted satellite broadcasts in Syria, the film would be viewable there after all. Amiralay asked the network to include in their broadcast a dedication to his friend Samir Kassir—a Lebanese journalist who'd been critical of the Ba'athist regime before being killed in 2005 by a bomb hidden in his car—implicitly accusing the regime of his murder.[2] Following the September 2006 broadcast of A Flood in Baath Country by Al Arabiya, which aired in Syria,[32] Amiralay was detained at a Syrian airport as he attempted to travel to work on a film in Beirut on September 19, 2006.[33] He was subjected to a 13-hour interrogation, arrested, and restricted from leaving Syria.[32][33] In protest, a screening of A Flood in Baath Country was held in France on October 31, 2006, introduced by writer Farouk Mardam Bey and followed by a debate.[34]

James Bennett called the film "a chilling look at a society stunted by Baathism".[2] Rashta Salti called the documentary "possibly the most explicit and compelling critique yet of Ba'athist ideology".[12] Stuart Klawans described A Flood in Baath Country as one of Amiralay's "most forceful" films.[10] Laura U. Marks said of A Flood in Baath Country that "Amiralay indicts the self-serving Baath regime with unremitting yet subtle sarcasm."[35] Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami call it Amiralay's "masterpiece of grim irony",[36] and Edwin Nasr called the film "a staggering confession of regret and a militant takedown of the Assad regime."[37]

In 2013, the film was ranked #45 on the Dubai International Film Festival's list of the top 100 Arab films.[38]

Antoine Wauters [fr]'s novel Mahmoud ou la Montée des eaux [fr] was inspired by A Flood in Baath Country. The novel's main character, Mahmoud, is based on an elderly former resident of one of the villages submerged by Lake Assad, filmed in A Flood in Baath Country speaking on a boat about his former village which now lay directly beneath him in the water.[39][40][41]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d Wright, Lawrence (2006-05-07). "Captured on Film". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  2. ^ a b c d e Bennett, James (10 July 2005). "The Enigma of Damascus". The New York Times Magazine.
  3. ^ Considine, Meghan Clare (2024-07-01). "The Déesse and the Dam: Extractive Audacity, Montage, and the Politics of Ecological Devastation on the Euphrates". International Journal of Islamic Architecture. 13 (Climate Change and the Built Environment in the Islamic World): 393–409. doi:10.1386/ijia_00146_1. ISSN 2045-5895.
  4. ^ Taleghani, R. Shareah (2020). "Docu-ironies and Visions of Dissent in the Films of Omar Amiralay". In Firat, Alexa; Taleghani, R. Shareah (eds.). Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production, and the State in the Middle East and North Africa. Syracuse University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctvz9383k.15. ISBN 978-0-8156-3679-3.
  5. ^ Behar, Daniel (2022). "Socialist Realism in the Language of Ḍād: A Literary Identity for Syria, a Test-Case for World Literature". Journal of Narrative Theory. 52 (3): 379–415. ISSN 1548-9248.
  6. ^ a b c d MacFarquhar, Neil (20 March 2004). "THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: DAMASCUS; Hussein's Fall Leads Syrians To Test Government Limits". The New York Times.
  7. ^ al-Shuqairi, Musa; Nou, Tamara (July 2008). "Temple of Art". NOX. Archived from the original on 13 November 2011. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  8. ^ Firat, Alexa (2023). "Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba'thist Syria by Max Weiss (review)". The Middle East Journal. 76 (4): 547–549. ISSN 1940-3461.
  9. ^ a b c Hassan, Hassan (7 February 2013). "A film that foretold the downfall of the Baathist conceits". The National. Retrieved 2024-11-06.
  10. ^ a b c d Klawans, Stuart (18 May 2006). "Wind From the Mideast". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Retrieved 2024-11-06.
  11. ^ De Châtel, Francesca (2014). "The Role of Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: Untangling the Triggers of the Revolution". Middle Eastern Studies. 50 (4): 521–535. ISSN 0026-3206.
  12. ^ a b c Salti, Rashta (2006). "Critical Nationals: The Paradoxes of Syrian Cinema" (PDF). Kosmorama (237).
  13. ^ MacFarquhar, Neil (2010). The media relations department of Hizbollah wishes you a happy birthday: unexpected encounters in the changing Middle East. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1-58648-811-6.
  14. ^ Dukhan, Haian (2014). "Tribes and Tribalism in the Syrian Uprising". Syria Studies. 6 (2): 1–28. ISSN 2056-3175.
  15. ^ Dukhan, Haian (August 2021). "The Politics of Tribalization in Syria". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 53 (3): 502–506. doi:10.1017/S0020743821000817. ISSN 0020-7438.
  16. ^ Dukhan, Haian (January 2022). "The end of the dialectical symbiosis of national and tribal identities in Syria". Nations and Nationalism. 28 (1): 141–153. doi:10.1111/nana.12785. ISSN 1354-5078.
  17. ^ Alkassim, Samirah (2020), Ginsberg, Terri; Lippard, Chris (eds.), "Amiralay and Sabbagh in the Post-cinematic Age", Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 203–230, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-30081-4_7, ISBN 978-3-030-30081-4, retrieved 2024-11-07
  18. ^ محرر 23 (2018-10-14). "طوفان في بلاد البعث". عنب بلدي (in Arabic). Retrieved 2024-11-07.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  19. ^ a b Jaafar, Ali. "Politics subvert Mideast fests." Variety, vol. 396, no. 7, 4 Oct. 2004, p. 8. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A123328249/. Accessed 6 Nov. 2024.
  20. ^ Matin, Le (2004-07-06). "7e Biennale des cinémas arabes : un film marocain primé à Paris". 7e Biennale des cinémas arabes : un film marocain primé à Paris (in French). Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  21. ^ a b "Paillettes et nouveaux talents - Jeune Afrique.com". JeuneAfrique.com (in French). Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  22. ^ "Le festival Cinéma du réel rend hommage au Syrien Omar Amiralay". Le Nouvel Obs (in French). 2011-03-24. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  23. ^ "DOK.fest München". DOK.fest München. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  24. ^ Jaafar, Ali (2004-10-03). "Inside Move: 'Flood' gates closed". Variety. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  25. ^ "Filmmaker Orwa Nayrabia missing in Syria". Masress. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  26. ^ "cyprus cultural events - Feb 3 - 24 - German Film Days in Nicosia South". www.heiditrautmann.com. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  27. ^ a b "أميرالاي يلخص سوريا.. البعث والطوفان". الجزيرة نت (in Arabic). Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  28. ^ Bidoun. "Fall Film Festival Diary: Beirut Cinema Days, Carthage Film Festival, Dubai International Film Festival". Bidoun. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  29. ^ Erickson, Steve (2005-04-20). "Tribeca Film Festival Turns Four – Gay City News". gaycitynews.com. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  30. ^ "A Flood in Baath Country | 2005 Tribeca Festival". Tribeca. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  31. ^ Ginsberg, Terri; Lippard, Chris (2010). Historical dictionary of Middle Eastern cinema. Historical dictionaries of literature and the arts. Lanham (Md.): The Scarecrow Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-8108-6090-2.
  32. ^ a b Moukalled, Diana (27 September 2006). "The Flood of the Baath". Asharq Al-Aswat. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  33. ^ a b "«طوفان في بلاد البعث» يغرق مخرجه في مشاكل السياسة احتجاز المخرج عمر أميرالاي في سورية رغم إنتاج الفيلم منذ عامين". Asharq Al-Awsat (in Arabic). 22 September 2006. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  34. ^ "Le documentariste syrien Omar Amiralay interdit de sortie de son pays". BABelmed. 5 November 2006. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  35. ^ Marks, Laura U. (2010). "Experience—Information—Image: A Historiography of Unfolding in Arab Cinema". In Iordanova, Dina; Martin-Jones, David; Vidal, Belén (eds.). Cinema at the periphery. Contemporary approaches to film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-3388-4. OCLC 402542116.
  36. ^ Yassin-Kassab, Robin; al-Shami, Leila (2018). Burning country: Syrians in revolution and war (New ed.). London: Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-3782-1.
  37. ^ Nasr, Edwin (2021-03-01). "Syria and/as the Planetary in Jumana Manna's Wild Relatives". Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. 51: 132–143. doi:10.1086/717406. ISSN 1465-4253.
  38. ^ Marwa Hamad (November 6, 2013). "Dubai International Film Festival picks top 100 Arab films". Gulf News. Retrieved October 11, 2015.
  39. ^ "Antoine Wauters, la memoria siriana svelata nella poesia". il manifesto (in Italian). 2023-06-27. Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  40. ^ d'information, Bibliothèque publique; Bpi (2022-02-26). "Antoine Wauters, Shalan Alhamwy et Jonas Malfliet – Poésie et barbarie". replay.bpi.fr (in French). Retrieved 2024-11-07.
  41. ^ "Lauréat Livre Inter: Interview d'Antoine Wauters sur la Syrie". Ici Beyrouth (in French). Retrieved 2024-11-07.
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