‘Iraq War Home Movies: Abbas Fahdel’s Long Format, Slow Documentary Homeland (Iraq Year Zero)’

Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) (2015) by Abbas Fahdel is an important document of the period before and after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. While, on the one hand, Homeland bears similarities to a home movie, on the other, it belongs to and claims lineage from a filmic movement hailed in critical discourse as “slow cinema,” encompassing films of a “slower than average pace, or longer than average duration,” a durational aesthetic that marks a “divergence” from mainstream practice (Stringer 2016, xx). Given Fahdel’s preferences for extended takes unfolding in real time, statically framed tableau shots, and focus on everyday and apparently insignificant moments, observed in minute detail, this chapter argues that the home movie and slow cinema provide pertinent theoretical and genre frameworks for understanding not only Homeland’s stylistic choices, but also its cultural politics, as it mobilizes these formats to address what is out of the frame in mainstream (Western) depictions of the war, namely its lived experience and consequences for ordinary Iraqis.