Director: Mohamed Al-Daradji
Producers: Isabelle Stead, Atia Al-Daradji, Rashid Masharawi, Dimitri deGerg
Editor/Producer: Danny Evans
Executive Producer: Hugo Heppell

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad-born Mohamed Al-Daradji returned home in 2004 with the dream of making a film about his agonized homeland, now freed at last from the tyrant's grasp. Under increasingly difficult conditions, he succeeded in making a feature film, Ahlaam. It was screened at many film festivals throughout the world, received many awards, and represented Iraq in both the Golden Globe and Academy Award® competitions in 2006. The extraordinary story of how that film was made is the subject of War, Love, God & Madness (In Arabic the first three of those words are written with characters that closely resemble each other). But this riveting new documentary is quite different from the usual-and in the DVD age, obligatory-making-of feature, and indeed its story can be appreciated even by viewers who have not seen Ahlaam. It provides a harrowing and unforgettable portrayal of the extraordinary ordeals Al-Daradji and his indomitable colleagues were forced to endure, including interrogation and torture. Struggling against time, persecution, imprisonment, injuries, and terrorist attacks, the cast and crew struggle on and, miraculously, manage to finish the film. In Godard's Pierrot le fou, the American director Sam Fuller is famously quoted as saying, "Film is a battlefield." In the case of Ahlaam, this unnerving documentary indelibly records, that wasn't simply a figure of speech.

Co-hosted by ArteEast.

--Peter Scarlet

Mohamed Al-Daradji (b. 1978, Baghdad) studied film and theater at the Art Institute of Baghdad and in Holland at the Media Academy in Hilversum. He then worked as a television cameraman for Dutch television. He received two master's degrees in cinematography and directing from the Northern Film School in England and won the prestigious National Kodak Student Award for best commercial. After Saddam's regime was overthrown in 2003, Mohamed returned to Iraq. The utter chaos he found inspired him to make his first feature film, Ahlaam, which screened at 80 film festivals and represented Iraq for Oscar® consideration. Mohamed is currently working on his next feature, Um-Hussein.

For the last three years my head and my heart have been injured. I had a dream that I thought I could create a film for my country and make my family proud. Filming in Iraq, it was my hope to help my countrymen re-define their future and show that growth can come through the revolution of culture, bridging the divides that war has created. Above all, I wanted to give hope to my family and do my part for Iraq. At times I fear the grief and sacrifice I caused my family may not have been worth it.

After a year of sitting on my book self, I finally reach up and grabbed the footage of b-rolls. As I started sieving through the footage I knew this was my answer to clear the past from my head, cramming three years of my own self medicated filmmaking therapy into 72 minutes of film for the world and god to see. The film is a personal journey for me and I guess my way of healing as I try to paint the picture of the world around me and within myself. This film has allowed me to explore myself and makes sense of the war, love, god and my own madness.

I believed by making a film (Ahlaam) I could find myself and help me and my friends. During the insanity of production I was able to detach myself from the reality surround me. On my return to England it was difficult to readjust back to the coffee culture, cosmopolitan lifestyle life around me as I thought of my family and friends back in Baghdad. For the next year and a half I was unable to find peace and knew I needed to look back and learn.

War, Love, God & Madness as with my first film Ahlaam was made from the heart and I hope goes to the heart. It is a gritty, behind the scenes look at my dream to create opportunities and hope in Iraq. But the reality today is still that my friends, family and country men are portrayed by the news as numbers, statistics without faces or feelings. I hope to open the world’s eyes to what is really going on in a country destroyed by wars, politics and oil in the hope we can learn from it and not have it happen again, it is a manmade problem that we can change.

This film I hope is the Iraqi people’s chance to show the world their side of the fence, told by the people that live there and not by an outsider looking in. I hope that with this film I will give me the meaning and the some answer to the last three years of my life, the war, love, god, my losses and my madness.

This film I hope is the Iraqi people’s chance to show the world their side of the fence, told by the people that live there and not by an outsider looking in. I hope that with this film I will give me the meaning and the some answer to the last three years of my life, the war, love, god, my losses and my madness.

These are the true stories of REAL people with REAL stories…