BAGHDAD TWIST

Director: Joe Balass
Release Date: 2007
Runtime: 33 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Country: Canada
Language: English and Hebrew with English subtitles
Website: www.imdb.com

Synopsis:
It could be anywhere. A mid-1960’s wedding reception captured on Super-8 film. Narrow ties. Bouffant hairdos. Flickering images of a joyful couple and smiling guests. A band plays and people fill the dance floor to do the latest craze: the twist.

But this is Baghdad, and for the city’s Jewish community, it is an evening of joy during a prolonged period of persecution. Within a few years, most of the wedding guests pictured in the film will have fled the city, never to return. Within a decade, the community, which has existed since Babylonian times, will be all but gone.

For filmmaker Joe Balass and his mother, Valentine, a memory is recalled, shared, constructed, from the fragments that remain.
“You were just a little kid. We left the house. You should see it. It’s like someone is still living there. The beds, the tables, the furniture, the food in the fridge-everything. You thought it was a game. You were not even four.”

Baghdad Twist is a visual memoir of one family's life in Iraq before escaping to a new home in Canada in the fall of 1970. Featuring a never-before-seen collection of archival images, home movies, and family photographs from Baghdad, the film pulls back the curtain on Iraq's once-thriving Jewish community, its perilous final years, and its remarkable ability to find solace in the shadow of fear.