OFFICIAL SECRETS is based on the true story of Katharine Gun, a British whistleblower who leaked information to the press about an illegal NSA spy operation designed to push the UN Security Council into sanctioning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Observer newspaper later broke the story and Gun was subsequently arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act, sparking a public outcry.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the people behind the true story, Katharine Gun and journalist Martin Bright, as well as the film’s director Gavin Hood. It will be moderated by FT film journalist Danny Leigh.

Complimentary drinks will be available from 7pm before the screening starts at 7:30pm.

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This BBC News Arabic investigation filmed undercover in Baghdad and Karbala – some of Iraq’s holiest shrines – exposes a secret world of sexual exploitation of children and young women by a religious elite. Muslim clerics are grooming vulnerable girls and pimping them out, using a controversial religious practice, illegal under Iraq law, called ‘pleasure marriage’.  This allows a man to pay for a temporary wife, but is being used by some clerics to exploit women and children for money. A young mother widowed by an ISIS bomb alleges she became the victim of a prostitution ring run by a senior cleric.  Some clerics are captured on camera offering girls for sale in pleasure marriages and giving religious advice on sexual acts with children that are supposedly permitted during pleasure marriages.

The 60 minute film screening will be followed by a discussion/Q&A with reporter Nawal Al-Maghafi and the film’s production team.

Speakers/Production Team:

Reporter, Producer Nawal Al-Maghafi is an Award-Winning BBC Special Correspondent who specialises on the Middle East.

Producer, Director Patrick Wells is a BAFTA-winning documentary producer/director specialising in foreign affairs.

Producer Mais Albayaa is an investigative journalist with more than 16 years of experience. She started working in Iraq after the invasion in 2003 and has covered Iraq, Syria and other countries in the Middle East for the Guardian, C4 and the BBC.

The battle to defeat ISIS in the region lasted years, resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and ruined vast tracts of cities such as Mosul and Raqqa. Involving some of most brutal urban combat since World War II, the fall of Mosul was key to the downfall of the Islamic State: soon after the remains of the so-called “Caliphate” began to crumble.

Ivor’s work focuses on the human struggles of conflict. Taken on the frontline, his pictures legitimately and compellingly record the experience of being “caught in the crossfire,” whether as a soldier or non-combatant. He furthermore captures post-war reality while attempting to reconstruct the final weeks of combat: the devastated cities including abandoned corpses of ISIS fighters, and, months later, families searching for missing loved ones, and civilians returning to reclaim their homes and lives.

Ivor will be joined in conversation with Anthony Loyd, senior foreign correspondent for The Times, to discuss the challenges of working on the frontline and the human stories behind his images. Copies of End of the Caliphate will be available at the event.

Speakers

Ivor Prickett is a freelance photographer for The New York Times. He has been based in the Middle East since 2009, where he documented the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya, working simultaneously on editorial assignments and his own projects. Traveling to more than 10 countries between 2012 and 2015, he also documented the Syrian refugee crisis. With a particular interest in the aftermath of war and its humanitarian consequences, his early projects focused on stories of displaced people throughout the Balkans and Caucasus. Ivor’s work has been recognised through a number of prestigious awards including POYI, Foam Talent, the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and the Ian Parry Scholarship. His pictures have been exhibited widely at institutions such as the Getty Gallery in London, Foam Gallery in Amsterdam and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He is represented by Panos Pictures in London.

Anthony Loyd is senior foreign correspondent for The Times. His career began in 1993 when he started reporting from the war in Bosnia. Since then he has written from innumerable conflict zones, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Chechnya and Kosovo. He is author of My War Gone By I Miss It So and Another Bloody Love Letter. He has witnessed the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the brutal rise of the self-styled Islamic State and the desperate struggle of the Syrian people caught between the two.

Civilians who had remained in west Mosul during the battle to retake the city, lined up for an aid distribution in the Mamun neighbourhood. Iraq – March 2017

Nadhira Rasoul looked on as Iraqi Civil Defence workers dug out the bodies of her sister and niece from her house in the Old City of Mosul, where they were killed by an airstrike in June 2017. Iraq – September 2017

In the past 40 years Iraq has endured three major wars, a violent coup, two invasions, a decade of bombing, two insurgencies, attack by the so-called Islamic State group, and a sectarian civil war. Living through such relentless bloodshed has taken a heavy toll on the nation’s mental health. More than one third of Iraqi children are thought to have moderate to severe mental illness and all social indicators, from divorce to suicide, show significant increases.

There’s only one psychiatrist for every 300,000 Iraqi people and just one psychiatric hospital in the entire country. Abu Leith, the hospital’s registrar, has been in post for decades and embodies its memory of Iraq’s dark times. He signs in all the new arrivals and takes it on himself to give a decent burial to those patients who die in hospital. Some have been admitted with no documentation; they languish inside for years, their identities never known.

The film tells the stories of children who, as a result of extreme trauma, are suffering a severe physical impairment such as the inability to talk or walk. This loss of ability is the physical expression of a mental condition, as we see with Maryam, who was 12 years old when IS sold her into sex slavery. Later she was forced to wear a suicide belt, though she managed to cut herself free from it. Since then, her speech has become impaired; we see her being treated by a mobile psychiatry unit, and finding some comfort in learning to be a seamstress.

As this film reveals, the biggest obstacle to overcoming Iraq’s mental health crisis is stigma. This is now changing, as community leaders encourage Iraqis to defy the traditional culture of shame and speak without fear about their abuse. More and more women are coming forward to speak out.

A year in the making, BBC Arabic’s documentary Iraq: A State of Mind explores the mental health crisis that’s gripped the Iraqi people.

Chair

Christopher Mitchell became Documentaries Editor at BBC Arabic in April 2018, after two years working for the BBC as a freelance executive producer. He is an award-winning writer, director and executive producer, having made many films for networks including BBC TV, ITV, Channel 4, ARTE, WDR Germany and Al Jazeera English. He was managing director of the independent production company OR Media from 2005 until 2014.

Speaker

Namak Khoshnaw is a Kurdish filmmaker from Iraq who obtained his MA degree at the University of West London in film and Art. He has produced numerous compelling documentaries for the BBC uncovering the plight of the Iraqi people living under Islamic State rule. Among his work is the harrowing documentary titled Slaves of the Caliphate which tells the story of Yazidi women held as sex slaves by ISIS fighters. the film was broadcasted internationally in 2014, and Namak won New Ground Award for outstanding reporting. He has also produced number of 360 virtual reality films for the BBC and New York Times. 

Photograph courtesy of Namak Khoshnaw.

“A story of blockbuster proportions! The Big Lie is an urgent and captivating story, told by a voice the world needs to hear.”  ★★★★ –  EDINBURGH49

“Shaniaz’s storytelling capabilities are intelligent, apt and truly cutting; a welcome break from the more trivial pieces of this year’s Fringe.” ★★★★ – THE LIST

“Shaniaz Hama Ali’s semi-autobiographical play contains all the elements needed for a great story…and like the rest of the fascinating hour that we spend in her company, we applaud her for it.” ★★★★ – BROADWAY BABY

Front Line Club are proud to present The Big Lie, a Edinburgh Fringe success production that is going off Broadway in New York later this year – via a pit stop at Frontline.

In this semi-autobiographical play, Shaniaz is an ambitious associate at Sweden’s leading corporate law firm and is assigned to work with their top client – a global arms manufacturer – to sell arms to Syria. The protagonist, an Iraqi-Kurd and a survivor of Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurdish people, has to consider whether or not to take on the case. Her conscience tussles with her ambition to become one of the firm’s partners, enabling her to join the ruling class.

The Big Lie makes us question our own morality. In her shoes, would we take on this case?

This humorous, gripping play is written by Hama Ali and directed by Oscar Toeman. Shaniaz worked as an associate at a global corporate law firm in Sweden, where she gained first-hand insight into a world that is normally hidden. Shaniaz fictionalised her experiences at the firm in a film screenplay that caught the interest of a Swedish production company. When Shaniaz moved to London, she made it into a one-woman show to bring to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018.

The show won critical praise in Edinburgh with 4 stars reviews from Broadway Baby, the List and Edinburgh49. It was featured in the Scotsman, listed as one of four must-sees by the Daily Record and was nominated for Amnesty Freedom of Speech Award. 

Shaniaz says of The Big Lie, “As a Muslim refugee I wanted to make a play about the racism I experienced growing up in an all-white, working-class neighbourhood in Sweden and why people vote for the far right, for Brexit and Trump. But mostly, I want to tell the truth about the clients of the corporate law firm that I worked in – the wealthy 1% and their role in all of this.”

During the Q&A we’ll be asking tough questions about the meeting points of politics and theatre in our society – and the relationship between art and activism.

Shaniaz Hama Ali is a Kurdish-Iraqi actress who came as a refugee to Sweden at a very young age. She joined the Swedish Labour Party and became the fiscal spokesperson for the Labour youth. But Shaniaz had a passion for acting that never subsided, she resigned from her job as a legal consultant and moved to London to focus on her acting career. She has since then starred in the short film PRACTICE; performed in the critically acclaimed French TV-series The Bureau (Canal+); and most recently in Red Snake, directed by Caroline Fourest, award winning French journalist, in her feature debut.

Oscar Toeman read English at St, Catharine’s College, Cambridge University, and trained as assistant to Roger Michell, Polly Findlay, Blanche McIntyre, Tim Carroll and Lucy Bailey at institutions including Shakespeare’s Globe, the RSC and the National Theatre. He was Resident Assistant Director at the Finborough Theatre in 2011, long listed for the JMK Award in 2014 and 2015, a National Theatre Staff Director in 2015, Interim Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio in 2016.

Siana Bangura is a writer, producer and community organiser originally from South East London, now working between London and the West Midlands. Her work primarily focuses on the intersection between race, class and gender, exploring issues such as deaths in custody in the UK, police brutality, and gentrification. Siana is the founder and former editor of Black British Feminist platform, No Fly on the WALL and most recently she was Campaigns & Communications Officer for an environmental charity in Birmingham, focusing on mobilising young people to take action in their local communities. Siana’s past contributions as a producer in theatre include ‘Fierce’ (Camden People’s Theatre), ‘Othello’ (English Touring Theatre), and she is currently an artist in residence at The Birmingham Rep. Siana is an alumnus of China Plate Theatre’s The Optimists, Belgrade Theatre’s Critical Mass, and is currently commissioned to write three plays of her own.

According to Emma Sky, the Middle East is in a ‘Time Of Monsters’. Where have these monsters come from? Join us for an evening with two regional experts with diverse experiences to dig deeper into the origins, complexities and fallout of these forces at large in the Arab World – and their relationship with Europe and beyond.

‘Hers was a fascinating world of senior military and diplomatic figures, many of them of the highest quality… She knew all the leading Iraqi politicians, many of whom regarded her as a personal friend. She saw much of Iraq and had some hair-raising experiences. And she always kept her sense of opposition to what was being done to the
country. Many people likened her to Gertrude Bell, the British political adviser who helped to create Iraq, and in some ways they were right.’
John Simpson, New Statesman

In her return to the Frontline Club, Sky will be building on over 20 years advising and enacting policy from Iraq and Jerusalem to Afghanistan with her most recent experiences travelling through a region in revolt.

Chair

Lyse Doucet is an award winning Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for BBC World News television and BBC World Service Radio. She is regularly deployed to anchor special news coverage from the field and interview world leaders. Lyse also reports across the BBC including for BBC Newsnight. She played a key role in the BBC’s coverage of the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa and has covered all the major stories in the region for the past 20 years.

Speaker

Emma Sky is a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute. She worked in the Middle East for twenty years and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services in Iraq. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Emma is the author of the critically acclaimed The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq.

 
  Watch the video stream of In a Time Of Monsters with Emma Sky and Lyse Doucet

You may have noticed that Populism is getting quite… popular. In the last 20 years, populist parties in Europe have tripled their votes. By 2018, they were in government in 11 countries. Populist leaders now govern countries with a combined population of over 2 billion people. How did we get here? Where are we going? What’s at stake?

There are, of course, no simple answers. Populism evades the traditional tropes of how politics plays out in democracies. Across the world, populist challengers are concocting complex hybrids of left-wing economics with exclusionary social protections to capitalise on mistrust of ruling elites – and a fear of mass migration. We’re joined by award winning author and journalists, Ece Temelkuran and Patrick Cockburn, to try and understand why, how: and why now.

In her new book, How To Lose a Country, Ece is proposing alternative, global answers to the pressing, and too often paralysing, political questions of our time. Temelkuran explores the insidious idea of “real people”, the infantilisation of language and debate, the way laughter can prove a false friend, and the dangers of underestimating one’s opponent. She weaves memoir, history and argument into an urgent and eloquent defence of democracy, fierce debate and dissent.

Speakers:

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She is also a frequent commentator on BBC and Channel 4. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots and the Ambassador of New Europe Award for Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. She has been twice recognised as Turkey’s most-read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media. 

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times since 1979 and, from 1990, The Independent. He has also worked as a correspondent in Moscow and Washington and is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books. He has received the Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting, the James Cameron Award, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Muqtada, about war and rebellion in Iraq; The Occupation (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007); The Broken Boy, a memoir; and with Andrew Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.

  Watch the video stream of How to Lose a Country

A Brief Visual History in the Time of ISIS, supported by Newspaper Club, is curated by Magnum photographer, Peter van Agtmael and includes an essay and timeline by Peter Harling, an expert on the Middle East, formerly of the International Crisis Group, and founder of Synaps. The work of nineteen photographers is included in this first newspaper, and the images range from those taken in the final years of the French mandate in Syria in 1941 to the fall of Mosul in 2017.

Each Magnum Chronicles newspaper will be curated by a different Magnum photographer, showcasing the breadth and depth of Magnum’s archive, combining contemporary images with archival to offer a unique perspective and context on global social and political issues through to lighter subjects of general interest. The aim of Magnum Chronicles is to create a series of intelligent free democratic publications that inform, engage and entertain through the use of visual narratives. Each publication will also incorporate collaborations with experts and creatives across many disciplines and fields, and will be in several languages.

Chair

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, currently, for The Independent. He was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, and is the author of several books on Iraq’s recent history, including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq and the most recent The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising.

Speakers

Peter van Agtmael was born in Washington DC in 1981. He studied history at Yale. His work largely concentrates on America, looking at issues of conflict, identity, power, race and class. He also works extensively on the Israel/Palestine conflict and throughout the Middle East. He has won the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer, the Lumix Freelens Award, the Aaron Siskind Grant, a Magnum Foundation Grant as well as awards from World Press Photo, American Photography Annual, POYi, The Pulitzer Center, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, FOAM and Photo District News. His book, ‘Disco Night Sept 11,’ on America at war in the post-9/11 era was released in 2014 by Red Hook Editions. Disco Night Sept 11 was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Book Award and was named a ‘Book of the Year’ by The New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Mother Jones, Vogue, American Photo and Photo Eye. “Buzzing at the Sill,” a book about America in the shadows of the wars, will come out in Fall 2016. He is a founder and partner in Red Hook Editions. Peter joined Magnum Photos in 2008 and became a member in 2013

Noman Benotman is Quilliam’s President and is an Executive Board Member. He leads Quilliam’s work on de-radicalisation processes in the UK and abroad, working to raise international awareness of Jihadist recantations, co-ordinating Quilliam’s outreach to current and former extremists and using Quilliam as a platform from which to share his inside knowledge of al-Qaeda and other Jihadist groups with a wider audience. He also heads the current research programmes. Born in Libya in 1967, Benotman first adopted radical Islamism in the mid-1980s after reading the books of Sayyid Qutb. In 1989 he travelled to Afghanistan where he fought against the Soviet Union, taking part in battles around Khost, Gardez and elsewhere. After the Soviet withdrawal, he helped set up the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group which aimed to violently overthrow Colonel Gaddafi and establish an ‘Islamic state’ in Libya. In 1994, he moved to Sudan where he forged close links with Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other key members of al-Qaeda. Since 1995 he has lived in London where he was initially part of the ‘Londonistan’ scene alongside other senior extremists such as Abu Qatada and Abu Musab al-Suri before gradually distancing himself from Islamism. During the last few years, he has played a key role in the disbanding of the LIFG and the issuing of its ‘refutations’. He is also well known as one of the most public critics of al-Qaeda, appearing widely on international media such as CNN and al-Jazeera as well as taking part in a range of international conferences. He has a degree in Human Development Studies from Birkbeck University and speaks English and Arabic.

The Frontline Club will be screening a new BBC documentary,  Stacey Dooley – Face to Face with ISIS followed by a Q&A with Stacey and director Joshua Baker in conversation with Catrin Nye.

One year on from her first visit to Iraq, Stacey joins Shireen – a 23 year old Yazidi woman who was held as a sex slave for over two years by the so called Islamic State. Shireen managed to escape while she was enslaved in Mosul, but many Yazidi woman like her haven’t, and remain in ISIS captivity.

Shireen takes Stacey back to Mosul, the self-declared capital of ISIS in Iraq. She wants to revisit the places where she was held captive, in order to finally draw a line under the past. In East Mosul, they find the house where Shireen was imprisoned and sexually abused by a leading ISIS executioner for months.

But it’s the Old City of Mosul, where Shireen finally managed to escape ISIS, that means the most to her. With a military escort, the pair travel into the heart of the Old City – where ISIS only months ago made their last stand in a devastating and brutal battle. The danger is real: ISIS militants are still being hunted and unexploded bombs litter the street.

Keen to see justice is being served, Shireen and Stacey sit in on an interrogation of an ISIS suspect in court. But with the Iraqi justice system overwhelmed by the sheer number of ISIS suspects, justice isn’t as clear cut as Shireen and Stacey might have hoped.

Armed with countless unanswered questions, Shireen and Stacey finally have the chance to get answers when they come face to face with a senior ISIS commander in a maximum security facility. He has murdered hundreds of men and raped countless Yazidi women and girls. His frank answers will stay with Shireen and Stacey forever.

Run Time: 44 mins

Credits

Production: Insight TWI

Presenter: Stacey Dooley

Producer Director: Joshua Baker

Producer: Helen Spooner

The event will take place at the Romantso in Athens.

In October 2016, an elite team of Iraqi Special Forces was tasked with leading the fight to defeat ISIS in Mosul. It was the beginning of a brutal battle of attrition that was to last almost nine months.

Filmed over the course of the whole campaign, MOSUL follows the experiences of four young soldiers: Anmar, a college graduate seeking revenge after his father was the victim of a suicide attack; Hussein, a ruthless sniper and aspiring football player; Jamal, a wise-cracking sergeant; and Amjad, a young recruit excited to be on the frontline.

Full of hope and good intentions at the beginning of the campaign, the soldiers are forced to confront the reality of fighting an elusive and vicious enemy in a city full of trapped civilians who are themselves fearful and suspicious of the army. And with victory in sight, tragedy strikes. When ISIS eventually capitulates, much of the city is destroyed, and the surviving soldiers are left haunted by what they have seen and done.

Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGRsBxgO4j4

To book a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mosul-screening-and-qa-with-filmmakers-olivier-sarbil-and-james-jones-tickets-39248865413

Credits:
Filmed and Directed: Olivier Sarbil
Co-Directed and Produced: James Jones
Produced: Raney Aronson-Rath, Dan Edge
Edited: Ella Newton
Production Managed: Pip Lacey

Following the screening and Q+A there will be drinks and refreshments available