Donning a thin black sweater and a veil, Aunt Hayat receives questions from a documentary filmmaker. That filmmaker is Zahraa Ghandour, finally mustering up the courage to ask about Nour, her friend. Hayat gives her niece everything she has about Nour, but missing girls are difficult everywhere. Searching for Nour, Flana diverts, focusing on Natalie. She’s a former ‘missing girl’, emancipating herself from her father, and she’s now living on her own. Independent women exist in postwar contemporary Baghdad, these women finally reconnecting with their loving family members.
The documentary uses familiar iconography to depict Baghdad, obviously dissimilar to the touristy pics on socials. Its uses of experimental and poetic film making doesn’t necessarily hide the mechanics of familiarity. Nonetheless, Flana shows the silver linings and small victories of its female interview subjects. Natalie walks along the off white hallways of a home she never probably expected to call her own. Her new life is different from her old one at the orphanage where missing girls usually go.
Being an Iraqi girl or a woman means surviving constant attacks either from families or foreigners. After Flana focuses on Natalie, it returns to Hayat in what’s basically an intimate sit down interview. These interviews, though, where Hayat remembers her mother, remind us viewers that everything is a luxury. After deaths and wars, smelling a late loved one’s scent through their clothes is a luxury. Depending on privilege, people discard things, but this documentary argues, mostly successfully, for objects as keepsakes.
- Rated: Unrated
- Genre: Documentary
- Release Date: 9/9/2025
- Directed by: Zahraa Ghandour
- Studio: CNC Aide aux Cinemas du Monde, Karada Films
