‘Songs of Adam’ tells the tale of an Iraq that does not age

Grass was deeply influenced by the tumult of World War II and anchored his tale in the scars of war, much like Rasheed's narrative draws from the turmoil of Iraq, and just as Oskar uses his drum to express his unique voice, Adam's whistles and silent songs of the sea and air communicate emotions that no-one else can grasp.

Speaking to Al Majalla, Rasheed saw the parallels. "There is no original idea," he said. "Originality lies in the nobility and quality of execution. The relationship between Songs of Adam and The Tin Drum… is the same as the relationship between The Tin Drum and Peter Pan. Further back, it connects to Sumerian texts, particularly Gilgamesh. 

"What I sought in Songs of Adam was to explore the relationship between our childhood and the adulthood we navigate daily. The script evolved from these concepts, but the primary challenge was convincing the audience that these extraordinary ideas could be realised through the everyday, through the mundane, and nothing else."

Exploring parallels

Adam is forced by his father to attend his grandfather's funeral, a confrontation with death intended to "mature" him into manhood. Repulsed by the corpse, Adam instead chooses to reject adulthood in favour of eternal childhood, remaining innocent. 

There are parallels to Iraq, a country seen by many as caught between its past and present, ageing without notable progress, and burdened by years of desolation. The film's barren and dusty desert setting mirrors this stagnation. 

"The choice of filming location was guided by the need to portray the conflict between quenching and thirst, between greenery and desertification," said Rasheed. "The villages in the countryside of Hit, in western Iraq, were ideal for this juxtaposition."

Spanning from the mid-1940s to 2014, Songs of Adam transcends war and politics, showing Iraq in a perpetual state of social and existential stasis. Refusing to grow up, Adam becomes a scapegoat. The villagers blame him for their halted livelihoods, much as solutions for Iraq's challenges appear equally elusive. 

Adam does not venture to Baghdad, a city deemed unwelcoming and unprepared to receive him. Instead, the narrative begins and ends with death—just not his. Instead, Adam watches from the sidelines, never helpless, yet never fully mature.

Inspiration and financing

This existential exploration aligns with Rasheed's earlier works. His first film, Underexposure, released after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, told the story of an Iraqi teenager shooting a personal film with the help of his friends, including a classmate, an autistic neighbour, and a wounded soldier. 

The first film to emerge from Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, it reflected a nation grappling with reconstruction after decades of tragedy, but Songs of Adam is less about political commentary than about human existence.

The film was financed entirely by sources outside Iraq. "There is confusion in film financing in Iraq and the region," Rasheed explains, diplomatically. "Arab societies are rarely given the chance to judge these types of films for themselves, without the imposition of an arbitrary marketing machine. This lack of autonomy stifles their ability to determine the form of communication on their own terms."

The director, who left Baghdad and settled in the US, said Songs of Adam "took years to develop", undergoing multiple iterations before reaching its final form. "Filming in western Iraq, particularly in the countryside of Hit, allowed me to visually and metaphorically depict the conflict between the Euphrates River and the surrounding desertification—a duality that speaks to both geography and metaphor."

Avoiding agendas

He dedicates the film to Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, whose cinematic work influenced Rasheed. "The correspondence between signifier and meaning, which is the highest form of cinematic precision, requires cinema to operate as a present-tense verb," he explains. 

"But this present-tense focus can easily devolve into agenda-driven cinema, a trap I avoid. When the political or social becomes a discourse within the structure of a film, it veers into propaganda. Instead, I treat the political and social as environmental or narrative elements, ensuring they align with the larger story. This approach offers a radically different way of understanding the world and the narrative itself."

One of the film's standout achievements is the casting of young Azzam Ahmed as Adam, selected after months of auditions involving dozens of candidates. "The secret lies in his eyes and in the peacefulness of his spontaneous human existence," says Rasheed. "I've never met a boy his age who exudes such reassurance and inevitability simultaneously."

He said working with Azzam took months of preparation. "We even rewrote key scenes to harmonise with his rhythm. I'm deeply satisfied with his portrayal of this character." In the film's final scene, Adam stands in water, cleansed of the mundane, gazing out at a lush and untarnished land both real and unreal.

It symbolises Adam's struggle to reconcile with the world. He is neither preoccupied with longevity, nor pre-emptively avoiding death, but rather fixated on separation and existence. In this way and others, Songs of Adam acts as an existential poem and a testament to the potential of Arab cinema.