14/08/2025 - Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji takes us onto the streets of Baghdad, where children have to fend for themselves if they want to survive the constant turmoil

l-r: Ahmed Layo and Yussef Hisham Al-Thahabi in Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream

In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Irkalla is the underworld inhabited by the dead, the demons and the deities. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the titular hero visited Irkalla on one of his missions. There is a theory concerning the lost, last tablet of the epic describing the hero’s second journey to the underworld. This serves as the source of Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji’s newest feature, Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream, which has just premiered in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.

Baghdad, 2019. The clashes between the police, protesters and different militias, often with terrorist agendas, create chaos on the streets. Everybody has lost somebody over the decades of wars and dictatorship. Our hero, Chum-Chum (Yussef Husham Al-Thahabi), is a sweet nine-year-old orphan who lives in a makeshift settlement of abandoned boats and barges on the Tigris River. For him, the epic of Gilgamesh, seen as an animated series on tapes on the school bus, is real, and the Tigris serves as the gateway to Irkalla, where he hopes to meet his dead parents. He even sees an elderly fisherman (Ahmed Layo) as Gilgamesh, his potential guide to the underworld.

The commune of homeless kids is run by a streetwise young hoodlum, Moody (Hussein Raad Zuwayr), who wants to earn enough money to take himself, Chum-Chum and Chum-Chum’s sister Sarah (Lojin Star Naima), whom he takes a romantic interest in, to the Netherlands. To achieve this, Moody does not shy away from anything – from collecting scrap metal for recycling to pickpocketing and performing missions for the militia run by the mysterious Sheikh (Jabaar Al-Janabii). What starts out as spying on and filming the routines of the kids’ teacher Mariam (Samar Kadhim Jawad) soon morphs into something more dangerous and ethically dubious. Is there a way for Chum-Chum to survive and stay pure in this dirty, perilous world?

Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream is a film for a specific target audience – youngsters over 14 years of age – and, as such, does a rare thing in portraying the street life of Baghdad from a child’s perspective, which at times seems very grim and down to earth and, at other times, naive with a hint of fantasy to it. And Al-Daradji manages to achieve this by getting the audience to feel empathy for his characters’ actions and causes. Ultimately, he points out the universal truth that hurt people hurt people, but he does so with a sense of authenticity.

The style of the film is suitable for its audience, but not exactly groundbreaking, as the filmmaker opts for a combination of handheld camerawork and drone shots of the city and the ongoing chaos there. The animations of Chum-Chum’s fantasies are a nice touch, however. In the acting department, allowances should be made for every individual performance, since the cast members’ experience in performing is extremely limited. Also, the melancholic orchestral music by Mike and Fabien Kourtzer is sometimes overly on the nose in its attempt to get us to feel a maximum of emotion. The script by Al-Daradji and Karim Traidia, with co-writers Shahad Ameen and Hasan Falih as “helping hands”, becomes problematic as well, as it gets predictable once the exposition is over and done with.

So, Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream will not score any extra points for originality or subtlety, but with movies for younger audiences, this is not the main goal, after all. Nonetheless, it is an authentic, and symbolically and emotionally potent movie.

Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream was staged as a co-production between Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, through Iraqi Independent Film Centre, Human Film and Image Nation Abu Dhabi, in co-production with Lionceau Film and Biet Ameen.