French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani turns childhood and exile into first-person animation in Flavours of Iraq, and the Guardian's review says Alani co-directed the film with Léonard Cohen while actor Malik Zidi narrates memories rendered as expressionist shapes and silhouettes rather than documentary footage. [1]

The review follows Alani from a Paris childhood in the 1980s through family visits to Baghdad and Falluja, then back to Iraq as a French journalist during the U.S. occupation, while his father's funeral gathers the anecdotes of an older Iraqi exile community and tastes, scents and relatives carry history at the scale of one family. [1]

That scale is the film's strength and its evidentiary limit because the review describes Alani's father as a leftist opponent of Saddam Hussein and recounts the film's anger at occupation and Islamist violence, which are elements of memoir and criticism here, not a complete independent history of Iraqi exile, war or jihadism.

The film was scheduled to show at London's Bertha DocHouse from July 24, after the edition cutoff, so the July 20 record is a published review rather than a theatrical audience result [1], while the required X search returned no verified status and diaspora response and Iraqi reaction therefore remain unobserved, not silently unanimous.

Animation can make memory vivid without making it adjudicated, and this film offers a journalist's route through family loss and return without replacing the archival, legal and historical sources required to settle the events around him.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem