Word: antoon
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...series, a group of movies from Iraq shown in CGIS-S last Thursday through Saturday. Films included several documentaries, as well as the winning entries from Baghdad’s First International Iraq Short Film Festival in 2005. The movies were introduced by poet, novelist, and filmmaker Sinan Antoon, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006. The series opened with Antoon’s film “About Baghdad,” a documentary on the effect that decades of oppression, war, sanctions, and occupation have had on the capital city. After the screening...
...fascinating in that they open a window into...the living, breathing film set that is Iraq right now.”The festival’s opening film will be “About Baghdad,” which was directed by a team of filmmakers led by Sinan Antoon, a professor at The Gallatin School of New York University who received his doctorate is Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard in 2006. Antoon will also be the festival’s keynote speaker, introducing each film before screenings.“About Baghdad” was filmed in Baghdad...
...Instead, Antoon focuses mostly on the anonymous citizens who have been mauled by the dogs of war, and none more so than children. Dylan Thomas famously refused to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London. Antoon is the polar opposite, and the deaths he elegizes are not accidental; they are calculated murders. In the most haunting stanza of the collection, from "To an Iraqi Infant," he addresses a young victim: "Don't be afraid!/ We'll arrange your bones/ Which ever way you want/ And leave your skull/ Like a flower...
...Antoon rarely mentions Iraq explicitly in the poems. Were it not for this slim volume's title - and a few references to the Euphrates and the Tigris - you'd hardly know that the poems in The Baghdad Blues were specifically about the ordeal of life in Iraq. Like Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic - whose Sarajevo Blues recounts the wracking of that city - Antoon finds that agony is agony regardless of your GPS coordinates...
...book is not pure pain. Antoon also sings of love. In the beautiful "Phantasmagoria II," he writes: "Your lips/ Are a pink butterfly/ Flying/ From one word/ To another/ I run after them/ In gardens of silence." Again, there's no sign that our Romeo is roaming the streets of Baghdad. Instead, Antoon has turned the sick city into a mirror of the world at large, where desire and disaster are never far apart...