Whisper with the wind by Shahram Alidi

A ramshackle car moves slowly along a dusty old road. The day is beginning to die, and the clouds are getting darker and darker. The only sound you can hear is the whisper of the wind. The landscape seems remote and we think we are in some kind of no man’s land, lost in time and memory. But no, we are in one specific place: Iraq. And perhaps because we know (or barely know) of the terrible events in its recent history, we realize that on this desolated road the world ends.

Behind the wheel of this car there is an old man, whose blue eyes are full of sadness: infinite sadness. At one moment he closes his eyes to rest for one second, but we know that he will never truly rest again. He has seen too many things during his life: war, young people killed, families turned apart, and mothers crying out their souls, invocating an improbable return of their sons. He has witnessed the unbearable and cannot forget. He is damned; cursed, because he is a survivor, carrying the weight of his country’s history deep in his soul.

A speakerphone over the car is pointed towards an indifferent sky, transmitting other people’s messages, lamentations, and personal prayers. These are letters that cannot be written but only cried out to the world; and this is the job of the old man, to record messages, undertaking some kind of infernal duty – for we must remember that hell is only on earth. These deserted cities are not only found in Iraq, but around the world where armed conflicts have left people helpless. To confess the pain is a way to find some relief.

At the beginning of the film a text explains about the ANFAL genocide during the regime of Saddam Hussein in the eighties, during which almost 182 000 Kurds were exterminated. Men were buried alive in mass graves and women were abused and sent to labour camps or brothels, leaving their homes, cities, and history behind. This film is almost like a letter to the survivors of these horrors (who also had to suffer two more decades of mass destruction, only with a bigger enemy: America), and what is so touching about it is the use of the landscape and natural elements to express the suffering through poetry. It’s interesting to observe the consequences of war and how it affects places. There are presences and absences living together; screams and silences meet in one single space, exposed to the wind that carries unanswered prayers for the lost ones, impossible to stop human yearning. This attention to the emotional landscape seems to say that time passes, and dust may cover the scars, but pain always remains the same.

Enrique Vivar