January 14, 2007	Sunday	Zilhaj 23, 1427

NEW YORK: If the Oscar for best foreign-language film were awarded to the filmmaker who overcame the greatest hardships and faced the biggest risks to bring his vision to the screen, Iraqi director Mohamed Al-Daradji would be the odds-on favourite to win the golden statuette for his debut feature film “Ahlaam”.

It’s hard to imagine any director ever faced more adverse conditions than Al-Daradji, who shot his film over four months in late 2004 amid Baghdad’s everyday regimen of blackouts, shootings and bombings.

When power went out, he used car headlights, flashlights and even candles to light his sets. Al-Daradji not only carried a camera but also-- to scare off intruders-- an AK-47 assault rifle loaded with blanks. An Iraqi policeman assigned to protect the film crew was killed in a shootout with insurgents.

On one day-- Dec 17, 2004-- he and his crew were kidnapped twice.

In the first instance, Al-Daradji says, he and three of his crew were kidnapped and narrowly escaped being killed by insurgent supporters of Saddam Hussein, who accused them of making a propaganda film supporting the US-backed Iraqi government. He says their captors were preparing to shoot them before fleeing at the sound of an approaching police siren.

Later that same day, he said he and his crew members were abducted from a Baghdad hospital by another group of gunmen who roughed them up before turning them over to the US military, who held them in harsh conditions for six days on suspicion they were filming insurgent attacks for Al Qaeda.

A dual Dutch-Iraqi citizen, Al-Daradji said he and his crew were released six days later after Dutch diplomats in Baghdad intervened. The Dutch Foreign Ministry confirmed its diplomats helped secure the filmmaker’s release.

Al-Daradji persisted to complete “Ahlaam”-- an Arabic woman’s name meaning “Dreams”-- which is Iraq’s entry for the foreign-language film Academy Award, only the second Iraqi movie entered in the category’s 50-year history.—AP