Cinema often trades in spectacle and sentiment. ‘Flavors of Iraq’ does something quieter and more enduring. It doesn’t reach for catharsis, nor does it dramatize suffering. Instead, it offers a lived-in archive of tastes, sounds, and silences drawn from memory and shaped by exile. Built from fragments of a life marked by dictatorship, oppression, and loss, this animated documentary unfolds with restraint, clarity, and unexpected warmth.

A collaboration between Franco-Iraqi journalist and documentary filmmaker Feurat Alani and French animator Léonard Cohen, ‘Flavours of Iraq’ was first a memoir composed of 10,000 tweet-like impressions, then a graphic novel and web series. It traces the descent of a country once imagined as secular and prosperous into decades of authoritarian rule, embargo, war, and religious fragmentation. The film offers an unsentimental but emotionally resonant account of Iraq’s modern history, as seen through the eyes of a child and son in reluctant exile.

Taking place against the backdrop of critical events in Iraq in the period between 1989 and 2017, Alani’s story begins when, at the age of nine, he visits Iraq for the first time, a country that had exiled his father. Decades later, on the occasion of his father’s Fatiha, the traditional Muslim ceremony for the dead, he returns again – through memory. What follows discards chronology in favor of layering impressions: the sweetness of apricot ice cream, the terror of a dictatorship that cannot be named, the quiet dread of martial law, the sudden arrival of American troops, and the devastation wrought by the Islamic State. Saddam Hussein is evoked, not shown – figured as Dajjal, the false messiah in Islamic tradition, or as a Voldemort-like presence, whose name carries weight precisely through its absence. The result is a portrait of a country remembered not through ideology or historical events, but through sensory detail and emotional residue.

Cohen’s animation is sparse and deliberately unpolished, but deeply evocative. The visual style leans into minimalism with flat planes of color, fluid motion, and selective detailing that evoke memory more than mimic reality. At times, the animation feels like sketches pulled from a diary: incomplete, but charged. Rather than distract with visual flourish, the art quietly supports Alani’s narration, letting the weight of the story emerge without embellishment. Archival footage appears only occasionally, and when it does, it punctures the abstraction with force.

Like the narrative itself, the animation never asks to be admired; it’s there to serve the story. Yet for all its strengths, the film’s final act falters. ‘Flavours of Iraq’ runs a concise ninety minutes, but its last fifteen feel bloated and hurried. New characters are introduced abruptly and serve more as narrative devices than emotional presences. The texture that defined the film’s earlier sections – the small, intimate moments of food, family, and fear – give way to a more conventional documentary mode, less grounded and more generalized. The emotional throughline weakens, and a palpable restlessness sets in for the viewer.

Watch the 'Flavors of Iraq' trailer:

This structural problem points to a larger issue: by its nature, the film’s source material simply works better as a series, which allows the space to develop secondary characters and explore recurring themes in a more modular way. Here, in compressed feature form, some arcs feel abandoned. It leaves the viewer wanting to see more from the protagonit's uncles, whose presence adds brief yet spirited moments of levity and affection. In the darkness, they offer color, absurdity, and grace. Their absence is felt.

But even with its uneven pacing, ‘Flavours of Iraq’ never loses its grounding. The film succeeds because it never forgets what it is: a personal ledger, shaped by love, loss, and long memory. And perhaps its greatest achievement is that it draws you in from the first frame, not through technique or spectacle, but through its voice.

Flavors of Iraq was presented in competition at the 2025 Anifilm Festival.

contributed by: Arsalan Awais

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