The Boys from Baghdad High is a British-American-French television documentary film. It documents the lives of four Iraqi schoolboys of different religious or ethnic backgrounds over the course of one year. The documentary was filmed by the boys themselves, who were given video cameras for the project. It was first shown in the United Kingdom at the 2007 Sheffield DocFest, before airing on BBC Two on 8 January 2008.
About The Boys from Baghdad High in brief
The Boys from Baghdad High is a British-American-French television documentary film. It documents the lives of four Iraqi schoolboys of different religious or ethnic backgrounds over the course of one year in the form of a video diary. The documentary was filmed by the boys themselves, who were given video cameras for the project. It was first shown in the United Kingdom at the 2007 Sheffield DocFest, before airing on BBC Two on 8 January 2008. It also aired in many other countries including France, Australia, the United States, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. The film brings together the video diaries recorded by four friends and students at the Tariq bin Ziad High School for Boys in Zayouna, a mixed-race, middle-class area in the Karrada suburb of Baghdad, Iraq. Each has high expectations for the year ahead and hope to graduate so they can have a chance to attend university. They face the threats of roadside bombings, the hassles of security checkpoints on their way to school, frequent curfews, the constant presence of American Apache helicopters overhead, and the deterioration of their neighbourhood which becomes rife with assassinations, muggings and kidnappings. Halfway through the school year, Ali’s family moves to the more peaceful Kurdish region in Northern Iraq but after living there for several months, Ali says that he is homesick and misses the action and noise of Baghdad. Mohammad, a Sunni Muslim, is the class clown at school, who prefers playing sports and fooling around with his friends to studying. His mother believes he is hard-working, self-sufficient and mature, and believes he will graduate and go to university.
Mohammad’s mother demands that he get rid of a bird with a broken wing and a mouse he finds in the house, but later demands he gets rid of the mouse as she does not want him to feel lonely. Anmar Refat, a Syriac Christian, tries to remain philosophical and hopes that armed gangs will not attack the school. He has a girlfriend, whom he can contact only via his mobile phone, but he has not heard from her in several days, leaving him worried about whether she has found another boyfriend, or has been hurt in the violence. The boys must also deal with the increasing sectarian violence that is starting to extend into KarrADA. Ali’s mother is hopeful about the arrival of American forces and that it is wrong to blame America for all of the problems in Iraq. She notes that the bloodshed has yet to stop as the Sunni vice continues to kill the Shiite vice, and that many Iraqi people feel that the people were no better than Saddam Hussein who came into power who was in power. Ali says he is hopeful that the American forces will stop the bloodshed as they were weak and that the Iraqi people look to them for help. He says he hopes that they will stop killing each other as they are the only ones who can save the country from the ravages of war. Ali Shadman is one of the few Kurdish people remaining in Baghdad. His family are struggling financially and resort to siphoning petrol from their car to run their back-up generator when the power grid fails.
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This page is based on the article The Boys from Baghdad High published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
