Review: ‘Iraqi Odyssey’ Shows the Arc of a Family and a Country
“Iraqi Odyssey,” a two-and-a-half-hour personal history written and directed by the Swiss filmmaker Samir (full name, Samir Jamal Aldin), is the kind of documentary whose length and complexity make you approach it with some apprehension. Watching it is like slowly leafing through a giant scrapbook whose contents include the individual stories of a large extended family.
Buffeted by war and political upheaval, Samir’s relatives, who are seen at different ages and in different places, belong to the Jamal Aldin clan, a well-educated line of professionals who trace their ancestry to the Prophet Muhammad. They became secularists during the period, beginning in the 1920s, of British rule. Today they belong to a diaspora of Iraqi émigrés scattered across the globe. Family members have landed in places as far-flung as Auckland, New Zealand; Buffalo; London; and Zurich, where Samir settled with his Swiss wife. Late in the movie, Samir remarks with some bitterness that since settling there, he hasn’t made a single friend.
Source: www.nytimes.com