When a son becomes a father, things can shift inside. Especially when a boy is born with eyes as brown as his, and just as gentle and sensitive. A child who, as young as he is, needs no words to notice that his father’s soul is somewhere else, in a place somewhere far away and long ago, where it is not pleasant for him. My father, Nour and me (EO) is about fatherhood, about war and flight, loss and humiliation and what you pass on to the next generation.
The ‘I’ in this story is Wiam Al-Zabari (38) and he is making the film for Nour, to watch it later when he grows up and understand why the Al-Zabari men in his family “have a history of very difficult to watch for a very long time”. Al-Zabari films himself and his son – who is about 3 years old when he starts and 9 when the film is finished. When Al-Zabari was 9 years old, he fled from Baghdad to the Netherlands with his mother, brother and sister. His father was already there. “I wanted to run to him, I wanted him to lift me up, comfort me and tell me everything was going to be okay.” But in the arrivals hall at Schiphol he saw a man standing with so much sadness and pain that he knew he would have to comfort him. That is where the story that Al-Zabari Nour wants to tell begins.
The war, the flight, the arrival. Al-Zabari remembers fragments, he asks his brother and sister to put their puzzle pieces together with his and asks his mother about the big why. His father was head of the law school in Baghdad, his mother ran a thriving hair salon there. Their house was beautiful, life was good, too bad Wiam can’t remember anything about it. Head of government Saddam Hussein asks father Al-Zabari to become ambassador for Iraq in France at some point. They live there, in Paris, when Saddam Hussein occupies Kuwait in 1990 and Baghdad is bombarded with cruise missiles in 1991.
Heavy story, light
Heavy story, brought light by Al-Zabari. Every now and then he stops the film, supposedly rewinds to tell some more history, and always keeps in mind who is listening. His son, for starters. He makes it small, insightful, as if he is also explaining it to himself as a 9-year-old. Once, as the film nears its denouement and he finally talks to his father about their past, we hear Al-Zabari say in the voice-over that it is only now, now that he sees the footage of that conversation, that for the first time hear what his father says.
Nice operation. On closer inspection, he sees for himself how he listened to his father, with his face turned away and his body turned away. There, on screen, he is still the accusing son. Why did they have to return with the whole family to Iraq, where the war was raging? Why did his father leave them there and leave without anyone knowing where? Why wasn’t he there to protect him when there were bombs and deaths? And, the most painful reproach, why had the father he knew disappeared when he was reunited with him?
“I was broken inside,” his father replies. “And I still am.” Not so much because of the war or the flight, but because of the humiliation in the Dutch reception centre. Suddenly he was a number. “Everything in me was destroyed then.” To which the son says: “And that is my problem.” His father was devastated, so he was too. It’s not that his father doesn’t understand him. He says Wiam was the gentlest of his three children, the one who needed his protection the most. He also gives him the best lesson a father can give. “Don’t wear your father’s clothes.” By which he means: let me live my life in peace, you live yours, without “complexes”.
For Nour you hope that Wiam Al-Zabari succeeds.