You never know what a broken record that’s also hard to find for a long time may be good for … For many years, the Iraqi-Lebanese filmmaker Parine Jaddo led a cosmopolitan existence in and between different countries and cultures. But after her mother’s death she travels to Kirkuk, where her once upper class intellectual family’s roots are, for a research project that is an interesting tangle of private, local, and geo-political contexts. On the surface, Jaddo is looking for a recording from the 1960s of her mother with the musician Dr. Mustafa and the Turkmen Brothers – as the band is called in the English subtitles. Increasingly, the filmmaker’s quest seems more like a stroll over the ruins of a nearly vanished piece of world music – long before the term was used in the first place. Music of which, after no more than a few decades, almost no visible or audible evidence survives.
One senses that the private grief over lost family memorabilia is only a trigger: for the subtle exploration of a once multi-religious, multi-ethnic and overall extremely generous form of coexistence in this Northern Iraqi region.

Ralph Eue