From Baghdad to Peace Country
2003 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Sherry LePage
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Canadian artist Deryk Houston travels to Baghdad in 1999 to witness sanctions' effects on Iraqi children first-hand. He builds large mother-and-child installations from rocks, gravel, and hay around the world to call attention to their plight.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Canadian artist making literal monuments to suffering in Baghdad feels like it could be self-congratulatory nonsense, but LePage never lets you off the hook—the film resists the easy redemption arc and sits in the actual discomfort of witnessing, which is genuinely weird and unresolved.
LePage's essay operates in a careful lineage of witness-cinema and land art documentation, where the formal act of building becomes a rigorous meditation on representation and complicity; the 28-minute structure allows each installation to breathe without didacticism, anchoring itself in restraint rather than rhetoric.
The decision to let the rocks and gravel speak longer than the artist's voiceover—holding on the physical labor of stacking, the texture of materials—is what transforms this from worthy concept into something that actually reaches you about presence and attention in the face of crisis.