31/03/2025 - In Zaradasht Ahmed’s emotive documentary, made following Mosul’s liberation from ISIS, a stone carving above a door takes on a symbolic value

Prior to 2014, the Old City of Mosul in Northern Iraq was an enduring touchpoint of Middle Eastern culture, architecture and history; following ISIS’s capture of the territory, and their eventual vanquishing by Iraqi and allied forces in mid-2017, it resembles nothing more than a desolate stone quarry, notwithstanding occasional material reminders of its past peeping out from beneath the rubble.

Yet in The Lions by the River Tigris, Norwegian-Kurdish director Zaradasht Ahmed’s elemental documentary on the city, this imagery is represented as if rebirth and reconstruction were in some way possible; stone subsists for centuries, after all. Following up his IDFA-winning 2016 film Nowhere to Hide [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Ahmed premieres his latest in the HUMAN:RIGHTS competition at CPH:DOX, with its style and focus resembling the on-location TV broadcast reporting he’s previously specialised in, whilst deftly weaving in several rich character arcs that help it become a more convincing cinematic documentary.

The film’s eponymous lions are just a fraction of real lions’ size: they exist in a bas-relief stone carving atop the doorframe of Bashar Salih, a local fisherman once residing there with his family, the irony being that it opens onto the utterly levelled remains of his house, its fate after being repurposed into a bomb-making factory by ISIS militants. It’s caught the attention of Fakhiri Al Jawal, a military veteran under Saddam Hussein’s regime who managed to flee upon ISIS’s arrival; returning to his home city, he’s embarking on an endearing second act as a collector and preserver of local heritage, focusing particularly on small consumer products and homewares. Fakhiri is converting part of his residence into a literal amateur museum – apparently visited by guests from across Iraq – and Bashar’s symmetrical stone lions would be the pièce de résistance of his chamber of bric-a-brac. (A shelf with an analogue TV masked by an ornate tea cloth encapsulates the overall aura.)

With Fakhiri flanked by his more mild-mannered friend Fadel – whose high proficiency with the violin and oud had to be hidden amidst ISIS’s clampdown on music – Ahmed’s film pivots on this nicely down-to-earth conflict, which has levity to it as much as it presses on their still-unhealed emotional wounds. They’re both correct in their mutual arguments: why would Bashar want to part with the one intact feature of his destroyed home, especially as the possibility looms that the interior could be rebuilt? And we sympathise with Fakhiri’s romanticism, wanting to bring the sculpture’s uncanny beauty to a wider audience as the museum’s new entrance, his own physical testament to Mosul’s enduring cultural heritage.

Ahmed grounds his perspective on the desecrated city in pure human relatability, without relying on over-exposition of ISIS’s many atrocities, which would have made his film feel more straightforwardly factual. We can intuit their past presence merely through his adroit tracking shots covering the devastation (indeed, he’s solely credited for the film’s cinematography); at points, Bashar even picks up pieces of human remains – bones, in his case – and just with a tentative raising of his hand, the utter vividness of his and Mosul’s trauma sears from the screen.

The Lions by the River Tigris is a co-production by Norway and the Netherlands, staged by Indie Film Bergen AS and DOXY.