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...Clark Walker | Roger Gnoan M’Bala...

Sattar Alwan is the producer of Zaman, the Man from the Reeds. He represents the film and his brother Amer Alwan on the Isola Cinema Festival. Amer Alwan was born in Babylon, Iraq, in 1957. He graduated from the National School of Dramatic Art and subsequently the School of Audiovisual Studies in Baghdad, which entitled him to work in Iraqi television. He left his country in 1980, leaving his family behind. In Paris he studied philosophy of art and made his first short films and documentaries. Zaman, the Man from the Reeds, is his first feature film.

"I left Iraq at 23 in 1980 to study cinema in Paris. I left my family, my friends, and all my memories behind in Babylon, my native town. Twenty years or so went by and I still had never gone back. Though France is my country of adoption I had always dreamt about my returning to Iraq. How surprised had I been to realise how damaged the country was with the absurdity of the war, the embargo and the new world order. For almost thirty years of dictatorship, nothing could be done in Iraq on economical, cultural and political fields without the agreement of the Baas party. We might as well say that cinema was almost non-existent. After this long absence of Iraqi cinema on the international scene, I have succeeded in shooting this first feature film. In spite of the omnipresence of censorship during the shooting, it was a real adventure which ended only a few days before the war started. This film was shot in January, 2003, in a marshy region located in the south of Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates. It has been shot in digital video, the export of film negatives to Iraq being forbidden. At the close of the shooting, five video tapes were confiscated by the Iraqi's former regime and disappeared forever during the events which followed. Edited after all, this film stays a witness of this chapter of history."
Amer Alwan