Hanging Gardens

The innocence of childhood crashes into the reality of a filthy adult world in Hanging Gardens. The title refers not to an ancient wonder but to an enormous dump on the edge of Baghdad. This is where 12-year-old As’ad (a magnetic Hussain Muhammad Jalil) picks through the rubbish with his adult brother Taha (Wissam Diyaa), bundling it into bags for the local kingpin Al Haji (Jawad Al Shakarji), whose mere presence is enough to make the local coffee house fall silent.

For all that the dump could have been plucked from Dante, with smouldering fires and flies a constant presence even during mealtimes, there’s a camaraderie between the two brothers as they work. First-time feature director Ahmed Yassin Al Daradji lets both the humour and the horror of the situation emerge in tandem. While As’ad and Taha might laugh about a discarded dress, they also make a grimmer find that Al Daradji indicates is far from their first.

Women are conspicuous by their absence in this ultraconservative society - the only one seen regularly acts as a voyeuristic outlet for Taha. This means there’s a solid blackmarket for the streetwise As’ad if he can scavenge discarded porn magazines. This lack of female presence means that when As’ad finds a blonde-haired blue-eyed sex doll at the dump, he is understandably drawn to it while simultaneously realising it’s a dangerous object to have in his possession. The doll is not the open-mouthed comical sort that usually make it into films, but a high-tech, if down on its luck, version, with a beatific smile, blinking eyes and, as As’ad discovers, even the ability to ‘talk’.

As’ad treats the doll, which he names Salwah, as a sort of revered companion but given that he’s in hock to older teen Amir (Akram Mazen Ali), he also recognises where there’s muck (and mucky thoughts) there’s brass. Soon the two are running a kind of pop-up sex shop, pimping her out from Amir’s pimped up bike. Al Daradji lets the ironies flow. The talk of things being haram (forbidden in Islamic law) crashing up against the sight of youngsters nearly queuing round the block for a turn with Salwah; the predatory tactics of those who simultaneously claim to be religious.

Al Daradji also has a way of making the usual meanings of things slip from their moorings. The non-sexual comfort As’ad derives from Salwah, the manner in which an old US tank ends up as a safe haven for the kid or the way that a ferris wheel becomes a place of confusion and sadness rather than joy. The director’s employment of humour only serves to further underline the general bleakness, while the casting of Jalil is his master stroke, he may be streetwise but he’s also vulnerable child who, like Salwah is being groomed to do and say what he is told and exploited by those who claim to know better.