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>> Filmmaker Joe Balass revisits a vanished
Jewish community in Baghdad Twist

LOOKING FOR A LOST WORLD: Balass

by MATTHEW HAYS

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.

It’s a simple enough image, a home movie that could have been taken anywhere. But for Balass, the context of the Super 8 footage is particularly noteworthy. The film was taken in Baghdad, where Balass’s family—along with a sizable community of Jews—lived until they fled the country in the ’60s and ’70s.

“I wanted to make a film that brings some joy into the darkness,” says the Montreal-based Balass. “It’s a real contrast to the current images we see of Iraq. I also wanted to create a testament to the Jewish community in Iraq which has all but disappeared.”

A VISUAL MEMOIR: Baghdad Twist

The result is Baghdad Twist, an NFB doc Balass calls a “visual memoir” of his family’s life and times in Iraq before being forced to flee to Canada in 1970. With the film, Balass hopes to illustrate what life was like for Iraq’s Jewish community, and how those perilous final years led to their migration from the country.

Set for the film festival circuit in ’08, Baghdad Twist has already screened to some advance audiences, and Balass says “many people are enchanted by the archival footage and the Super 8 film—they are seduced by how beautiful the country was, how people dance the Twist just like in the West.”

Sadly, making this film could not include a visit back to the country of Balass’s origin. “I don’t really know what Baghdad is like today, and I was too young to have clear memories of our escape. I haven’t been back because it’s been too dangerous. The film is made up of news and propaganda footage, old photos and home movies. As you see in the footage, it used to be a multicultural society that could offer hope to its citizens of different ethnicities and religions.”

And there was also an intensely personal reason for making Baghdad Twist. “I wanted to honour my mother, who saved our family by running away with us in 1970. The most surprising thing was that my parents had no concrete plan for our escape. We just went north, to Kurdistan, and then camped in the middle of nowhere in the mountains until we found a guide to lead us to Iran.”