Baghdad Twist

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The Film

Baghdad Twist features a unique, never before seen collection of archival images, home-movies and family photographs from Iraq. The film pulls back the curtain on Iraq's once thriving Jewish community. Baghdad-born filmmaker Joe Balass takes us on a poetic journey through the fragmented memories of an Arab exile in a film that evokes nostalgia for home, for an Iraq that no longer exists.

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It could be anywhere. A mid-1960s’ wedding reception captured on Super-8 film. Narrow ties. Bouffant hairdos. Flickering images of a joyful couple and smiling guests. A band plays and people fill the dance floor to do the latest craze: the twist.

But this is Baghdad. And for the city’s Jewish community, it is an evening of joy during a prolonged period of persecution. Within a few years, most of the wedding guests pictured in the film will have fled the city, never to return. Within a decade, the community, which has existed since Babylonian times, will be all but gone.

For Baghdad-born filmmaker Joe Balass and his mother Valentine, a memory is recalled, shared, constructed, from the fragments that remain.

"You were just a little kid. We left the house. You should see it. It’s like someone is still living there. The beds, the tables, the furniture, the food in the fridge—everything. You thought it was a game. You were not even four."

Baghdad Twist is a visual memoir of one family’s life in Iraq before escaping to a new home in Canada in the fall of 1970. Featuring a never-before-seen collection of archival images, home movies and family photographs from Baghdad, the film pulls back the curtain on Iraq’s once thriving Jewish community, its perilous final years and its remarkable ability to find solace in the shadow of fear.

 

Joe Balass, Director

Joe Balass is an independent filmmaker working in both fiction and documentary. He lives in Montreal where he operates the film production company Compass Productions Inc. He also works as a freelance editor, photographer and cameraman.

Balass was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1966 and after escaping with his family at the age of four, he eventually settled in Canada. He has produced and directed a number of award-winning films and videos including The Devil in the Holy Water and Nana, George & Me. He expresses a very spontaneous blend of seriousness and humour in his approach to filmmaking. At present, Joe Balass is working on a number of documentary projects as well as a fiction feature.

 

Germaine Ying Gee Wong, Producer (NFB)

Germaine Ying-Gee Wong's distinguished career with the National Film Board of Canada spans three decades, with numerous credits in documentary and feature film.

In 2001 she was a producer on the landmark Canadian feature film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Co-produced by the NFB, this first Inuit-language drama was hailed as a masterpiece by New York Times film critic AO Scott, and won many international awards, including the prestigious Camera d'or for Best First Feature Film at the 2001 Cannes International Film Festival. The film also took home five Genie Awards (Canada's top film honour) including Best Picture.

In 2004, Wong received a Genie nomination for the documentary Mr. Mergler's Gift. Directed by Academy-Award-winner Beverly Shaffer, the film is a moving account of a student and her mentor‚ and a lyrical reflection on the transcendent power of music.

Other documentary credits include the award-winning Okimah, about the Cree goose hunt, and Music for A Blue Train, which documents the struggles of subway musicians in Montreal.

Click here to see complete credits

Montreal Mirror, Noisemakers 2008

"Joe Balass says it began with a home movie his family took the year before he was born. In it, two newly blended families are dancing up a storm in 1965, doing the Twist at a wedding celebration." ... More

IDFA review

"Director Joe Balass interviews his mother Valentine, a Jewish Iraqi who fled her native country in 1970, when Joe was four. We hear the interview in voice-over while old photographs and archive footage fill the screen: first of snowy Canada, where the family fled to, and then of Iraq in the 1960s." ... More