Iraq as they didn't want you to see it

In the Shadow of the Palms

Produced and Directed by Wayne Coles-Janess

In selected cinemas now

Wayne Coles-Janess's In the Shadow of the Palms is a 91-minute documentary depicting the lead-up to and horrific aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Australian-based filmmaker Coles-Janess provides us with a previously unseen glimpse of the richness and dignity of pre-occupation Iraqi daily life — despite the UN-imposed sanctions and the Saddam Hussein dictatorship. The film is an insight into what has been destroyed in Baghdad.

Coles-Janess was not "embedded" with US or Australian forces in Iraq. This allows him to show the human face of this war. Without narration, he allows the Iraqis to speak for themselves. A shoemaker, busy repairing shoes that cannot be replaced due to the decade-long UN embargo, defends the Iraqi resistance against the claim that they are "terrorists".

The film depicts the resilience of the people of Baghdad as they adjust to the inevitability of invasion. "There is only God now," says an old woman. A young woman, learning first aid in a classroom, smiles at the camera, "If I die you can broadcast me in Australia".

The tension rises as title-cards count down: four weeks, three weeks, seven days, 12 hours. Then the bombing starts and the scene of this ancient city being destroyed is tragic.

The camera rolls while bombs rain down on Baghdad and a baby, injured in the bombing, takes its last breath in the arms of its weeping mother.

Left homeless and out of work as a result of the US invasion and refusing to work for its US-puppet government, Coles-Janess's translator, a Palestinian refugee, finds himself forced to register with the UN refugee commission just as his wife is about to give birth to their first child.

Defined by the UN as stateless and unable to acquire papers, his future, like that of the country in which he finds himself, is uncertain. Through his translator's story Coles-Janess provides a moving insight into that inescapable product of war and occupation: refugees.

In making the film Coles-Janess was detained a number of times by Iraqi police, even though he had permission to film. Some of his tapes were intentionally destroyed on their way back to Australia. But Coles-Janess had made a copy.

Coles-Janess is the producer of Life at the End of the Rainbow (2002), Bougainville: Our Island, Our Fight (1997), On the Border of Hopetown (1992) and was producer-director of Foreign Correspondent, Front Up and The Movie Show.

From GLW issue 688