Our River... Our Sky Film Screening with Q&A

POSTPONED EVENT: Please note this event has been postponed from Thursday 10 November to Wednesday 16 November.

This event will screen the drama Our River... Our Sky followed by a Q&A with the Director, Maysoon Pachachi and Co-Writer, Irada Al-Jubori.

Sara is a single mother and novelist, shocked into silence at a time of extreme sectarian violence and nightly curfews in Baghdad. She and her neighbours invite us into their everyday lives, as their world fragments and they attempt to renew a fragile sense of hope for a better future. Set against the backdrop of intense sectarian war, Our River… Our Sky follows the stories of a small Baghdad community trying to find some semblance of normality and hope despite unpredictable violence, turmoil, and loss. Maysoon Pachachi’s film offers a glance at the realities of ordinary life in Baghdad. Through the chaos and destruction, the residents never let their ambitions and desires for the future fade. Yet, they can’t help but contemplate leaving Iraq, and are forced to ask a painful question – who does Baghdad really belong to?

Maysoon Pachachi is a London-based filmmaker of Iraqi origin and Writer and Director of Our River... Our Sky. For many years, she was a documentary and drama film editor in the UK, and since setting up her production company, Oxymoron Films, in 1994, she has made independent feature documentary films, largely shot in the Middle East and often focusing on the lives of women. Our River... Our Sky is her first narrative feature film as director. She has taught filmmaking in the UK and Palestine and in 2004 co-founded a free-of-charge film training centre in Baghdad.

Irada Al-Jubori is an Iraqi novelist, researcher, and women's rights activist. She currently works as a professor at the College of Mass Communication – University of Baghdad and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Media Research. Between 1990 and 2015, she published several fiction and short story collections as well as writing scripts for documentaries. Al-Jubori has also collaborated with Maysoon Pachachi on a project entitled Open Shutters  in Iraq. This was a photography project producing a bilingual book and documentary.

Toby Dodge is a Professor in the Department of International Relations, where he is Deputy Head of the Department (PhD and Research). He is also Kuwait Professor and Director of the Kuwait Programme, Middle East Centre. Toby's research concentrates on the evolution of the post-colonial state in the international system. The main focus of this work on the developing world is the state in the Middle East, specifically Iraq.

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