HAMS AL MOODUN

Kasim Abid describes his two previous short films, and this small city symphony with no story or dialogue as “a play without a playwright”. Like Victor Kossakovsky’s Tische, which shares the same vantage point, Whispers of the Cities restores the original sense of the cliché that the documentary is a window onto the world. Over a ten-year period, the filmmaker, who trained as a cameraman, took up position on a balcony in three Middle Eastern towns: Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan; above the Montaza Al Sa’a crossroad in Ramallah in the middle of the second Intifada (2000-2003); and from the top of a building in the Karrada district of Baghdad, the filmmaker’s hometown, which he left 30 years ago and was then occupied by Americans. From endless construction works to huge traffic jams at an intersection, this ballet of workers and machines initially offers the senses an urban choreography. But the circulation of the itinerant bakers returning each evening after curfew, street sweepers, beggars and schoolchildren is constantly hampered – the outcome of a political situation that sparks the viewer’s imagination. On the stop-start worksites where security wavers, construction struggles against chaos, whilst on the street, orderliness at times takes a coercive turn. Yet, the cumulative effect of this dispositif also reveals a journey through governments and occupations. Midway between Jacques Tati and Elia Suleiman, a population’s resilience can also take the form of a stubborn fountain.

Charlotte Garson