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A Flood in Baath Country

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2003 Syrian anti-Baathist documentary
A Flood in Baath Country
طوفان في بلد البعث
Déluge au Pays du Baas
Original French release poster
Directed byOmar Amiralay
Produced byARTE France, AMI'P, Ramad Film
Narrated byOmar Amiralay
CinematographyMeyar Roumi
Edited byChantal Piquet, Fabio Balducci
Release date
  • 2003 (2003)
Running time47 minutes
CountriesSyria, France
LanguageArabic with French subtitles

A Flood in Baath Country (Arabic: طوفان في بلد البعث, romanized: Toufan fi Balad al-Baath) is a Syrian documentary film by the director Omar Amiralay, released in 2003 and premiered in 2004 at the Beirut Cinema Days Festival. The film, Amiralay's last, criticizes the Baa'thist regime in Syria, particularly the Tabqa Dam construction project and the party's impact on political life and education in the country. In A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay repurposes footage from his first film to criticize his initial enthusiasm for the Ba'ath Party. Though banned in Syria like most of Amiralay's films, A Flood in Baath Country was readily available domestically on pirate DVD. After a satellite broadcast of the film was seen by Syrian viewers, Amiralay was arrested and restricted from leaving the country. A Flood in Baath Country has been acclaimed by critics and scholars of film, and won the award for the best short film at the 2004 Biennale des films arabes in Paris.

Background and production

The construction of the Tabqa Dam led to the submerging of villages under Lake Assad

In his first film, 1970's Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam, Amiralay had supportively documented the Ba'ath Party's construction of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates. In the river's damming, Lake Assad was formed as the dam's reservoir, flooding archaeologically important villages and displacing their tribal inhabitants. New settlements around the reservoir were constructed for the displaced villagers. Over thirty years of Ba'ath rule later, A Flood in Baath Country criticizes the regime and the dam. For the film, Amiralay visited Busha'ban tribespeople who were displaced by the dam's construction, and repurposed footage from Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam to criticize his initial enthusiasm for the party, for which he felt "deep shame". As Neil MacFarquhar reports, Amiralay wanted to "atone" and to "expose government propaganda for what it is". In a 2008 interview, Amiralay explained his return to Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam: "Wanting to criticize the Ba'ath regime, I am actually able to start with self-criticism by admitting that at one point I made a film to glorify the Euphrates dam. Today, having revisited it, I can explore its catastrophic effects—and integrity requires that I include myself in the criticism."

When doing research for A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay came to believe that the dam was not constructed to generate power, but to protect the regime from the possibility that Turkey would restrict Syria's water supply. He was also particularly incensed to learn that the site submerged by Lake Assad was "the place where human beings became farmers for the first time, and left the hunting-and-gathering stage, eleven thousand years before Christ." Amiralay was inspired to make the film after witnessing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, saying: "When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next". The film's working title was Fifteen reasons why I hate the Baath Party.

Speaking to Lawrence Wright, Amiralay described the film's working concept: "I wanted to make a film of fifteen shots, which are the fifteen reasons I hate the Baath Party. The last reason was that I hate myself, for having been obliged to make a film for them. They spoiled forty years of my life." In a 2022 interview, Mohamad al-Roumi, who assisted in the production of A Flood in Baath Country, said that the script he received from Amiralay was named Twelve Reasons Why Omar Hates the Baath Party. According to al-Roumi, "those 12 reasons had evolved into 20 or 25" by the time he saw the final film.

Amiralay was pondering producing the film with the National Film Organization, but Syrian director and photographer Mohamad al-Roumi encouraged him to make it himself, and offered all of his own equipment for Amiralay to use. Al-Roumi also helped Amiralay to film in the region despite not having the necessary approvals. Amiralay continued shooting without al-Roumi when the latter traveled to France. Al-Roumi notes that many of the film's subjects believed that the documentary was being made for "an official institution", which led them to "exaggerate their glorification of the Baath Party and the leader" in their interviews.

Content

At the beginning of A Flood in Baath Country Amiralay speaks over footage from Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam about his remorse at having made it; about a report that all the early Ba'ath-constructed dams were at risk of collapsing like the Zeyzoun had in 2002; and of the dam's reservoir, Lake Assad, as a symbol for the regime, "submerging all life in Syria". The documentary depicts extreme poverty in Syria and the Ba'ath Party's full control of the country's political life. In the documentary, Shaykh Diab al-Mashi, a former leader of the Busha'ban tribe and the longest-serving member of parliament in Syria, discusses his loyalty to President Hafez al-Assad, who rewarded al-Mashi with a permanent seat in the Syrian Parliament. The school's village, al-Mashi (between the Euphrates and Manbij), is named after the parliamentarian's family.

Hafez al-Assad in 1970

In footage from a rural village elementary school, whose principal Khalaf is Diab al-Mashi's nephew, children mouth and chant Baath slogans in praise of the president by rote, such as "We are the voice of the proletariat. In sacrifice, we eat little." They also read from a Ba'athist textbook praising the Tabqa Dam's construction, reading: "On the fifth of July, the Euphrates River joined a new school to learn how to read and write and to fall in love with the fields and the trees in a modern way. At the school's door, President Hafez al-Assad removed the river's muddy cloak, trimmed his unkempt hair, cut his long nails and gave him a green-ink pen and a notebook to write his diaries as a civilized river." The film ends with a monologue from an elderly fisherman on a boat floating on Lake Assad. He says that children don't know that the Euphrates used to be different, saying that "they think this lake has been here forever." At one point, he points to a parcel of water and says that his drowned village is there.

The film employs long shots and close-ups, in contrast to the "unusual cinematic punctuations" including freeze-frames, repeated motifs, and distorted angles used in Amiralay's earlier Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974). Samirah Alkassim writes that A Flood in Baath Country "shows water to be an allegory for policies of erasure that require the people's indoctrination to ensure their compliance". According to Enab Baladi, the film's slow and silent shots reflect the stagnation and monotony of life in the villages around the reservoir. Chantal Berman describes the "oft-repeated signature shot" of the film as an "excruciatingly slow" passage through a doorway, which she finds claustrophobic in imitation of "circumscribed political vision". Nathalie Khankan writes of the film's cinematography: "Amiralay's camera is patient, frames are carefully composed, the view is quietly panoramic."

Reception, censorship, and arrest

The film was released in 2003 and had its premiere in 2004 at the Beirut Cinema Days Festival. It also played at the 2004 Biennale des films arabes in Paris, where it won the award for best short film. The jury of the 2005 Munich DOK.FEST's Horizons Award gave the film a special mention. Following reported political pressure, the 2004 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia cancelled plans to screen A Flood in Baath Country. 53 film directors criticized the decision in an open letter to the festival's director Nadia Attia, and a number of filmmakers withdrew their submissions to the festival in protest, including Danielle Arbid, Joana Hadjithomas, Nizar Hassan, Annemarie Jacir, Khalil Joreige, and Yousry Nasrallah. Enab Baladi reported that the Baathist regime had directly requested that the Tunisian government prevent the screening. In response to the backlash, Attia relented and re-admitted the film to be shown a single time, outside of official competition and on the final day of the festival. Jeune Afrique reported that the news of the screening's cancellation had just been an unfounded rumor, and that the Festival had kept its promise to not engage in censorship. A Flood in Baath Country had its North American premiere at the 2005 Tribeca Festival, where it was shown alongside Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam.

Omar Amiralay implicitly accused the Baathist regime of assassinating Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir (statue pictured)

A Flood in Baath Country was banned from release in Syria, but Amiralay released the documentary to film pirates and said that within the next two months, everyone in Damascus had seen the film. He called the phenomenon a "digital flood". James Bennett wrote in 2005 that he had seen the film on DVD despite the censorship "like everyone else ". In an interview with Bennett, Amiralay said that an Arab satellite network had bought the rights to broadcast the film. The broadcast would be viewable in Syria since satellite television had recently been legalized in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad. Amiralay requested that the network include in their broadcast a dedication to his friend Samir Kassir—a Lebanese journalist who had been critical of the Ba'athist regime before being fatally injured by a car bomb in 2005—implicitly accusing the regime of his assassination. Following the September 2006 broadcast of A Flood in Baath Country by Al Arabiya, which was also seen by Syrian viewers, Amiralay was detained at the Jordan–Syria border as he attempted to travel to Jordan to work on a film that same month. He was subjected to a 13-hour interrogation, arrested, and restricted from leaving Syria. In protest, a screening of A Flood in Baath Country, featuring a debate and an introduction from writer Farouk Mardam Bey, was held in France on October 31, 2006. The restriction on Amiralay's travel was lifted on October 29, 2006.

James Bennett called the film "a chilling look at a society stunted by Baathism". Rashta Salti called the documentary "possibly the most explicit and compelling critique yet of Ba'athist ideology". Stuart Klawans described A Flood in Baath Country as one of Amiralay's "most forceful" films. Laura U. Marks said of A Flood in Baath Country that "Amiralay indicts the self-serving Baath regime with unremitting yet subtle sarcasm." Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami call it Amiralay's "masterpiece of grim irony", and Edwin Nasr called the film "a staggering confession of regret and a militant takedown of the Assad regime." The Austrian Film Museum said the film represented "a melancholy yet bitter summation of Syria's era of state socialism", and Peter Scarlet called it " rare contemporary example of filmmaking combining formal mastery with political courage". A Flood in Baath Country "brought to international renown".

Mohamad al-Roumi, who assisted in early shooting for the film, found that while the film lacked "a dramatic dimension" and failed to explore characters like Diab al-Mashi as victims of the Baath Party, it is "without a doubt an important document of what Syria lived through because of the Baath Party and the authorities in power." In 2013, the film was ranked #45 on the Dubai International Film Festival's list of the top 100 Arab films. Antoine Wauters [fr]'s novel Mahmoud ou la Montée des eaux [fr] was inspired by A Flood in Baath Country. The novel's main character, Mahmoud, is based on an elderly former resident of one of the villages submerged by Lake Assad, filmed in A Flood in Baath Country speaking on a boat about his former village which now lay directly beneath him in the water.

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External links

Films directed by Omar Amiralay
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