Flavours of Iraq review: an exiled French-Iraqi journalist turns memory into animation
Feurat Alani's animated memoir of 1980s Baghdad translates a childhood spent between Iraq and his father's leftist exile in Paris into a sequence of vivid, almost edible memories.
On a screen in Paris, a hand reaches across an open notebook and traces the calligraphic outline of a house. The image fills with apricot light; the page turns; Baghdad, in a child's handwriting, becomes a city of courtyards, river light, and simmering pots. The hand belongs, by way of voiceover and by way of memoir, to Feurat Alani, the French-Iraqi journalist whose animated first feature was reviewed in The Guardian on 20 July 2026 under the slightly lumpy English title Flavours of Iraq. The film is a work of recollection: 1980s Baghdad remembered from a small apartment in the working-class suburb of Saint-Ouen, where Alani's father, a prominent Iraqi leftist exiled by Saddam Hussein's regime, spent his last years taping recipes and grief to the kitchen table.
Memory work of this kind is rarely so literal. Alani's chosen mode, rotoscoped animation over contemporary interviews with Iraqi diaspora figures in Paris, pulls the story in two directions at once: back toward a Baghdad Alani barely knew as an adult, and forward toward a diasporic present that has finally found the vocabulary to describe what exile cost. The film treats the title metaphor as a working brief. Food becomes the ledger that balance-sheet politics could not have written.
The kitchen as archive
The dominant image in the film, according to the Guardian review, is the kitchen of a small French flat. From that cramped room, Alani's father phones family members still inside Iraq. He is deaf, and the conversations move in tinny, lag-bound bursts across the line. His son listens, and the listening becomes the film's compositional spine: voice on a telephone, voice on a passport, voice on a menu card handed over by a morgue.
Animation does two things here that straightforward documentary could not. It allows Alani to recreate a Baghdad he left too young to photograph; and it allows him to keep his father's face off-screen. The reviewer notes that the father, the curator of the family archive and the film's emotional centre, appears largely as a hand, a phone receiver, a notebook. His absence from the frame is the argument the film makes about a generation that could only mark its presence in what it cooked, taped, and posted.
The recipes themselves, kifta pressed into the palm, kubba sliding off a fork into boiling water, carry the weight of a place Alani barely inhabited. Food, the film insists with a quiet stubbornness, is one of the few archives that survives a regime. Governments rewrite history; kitchens do not, quite.
A French-Iraqi register
The cultural register of Flavours of Iraq sits inside a small but accumulating body of French-language work that has tried, since 2003, to render the post-Ba'athist Iraqi experience on screen. Alani is a journalist as much as a filmmaker, and the picture's structure, a series of testimonies stitched by an autobiographical voice-over, leans on documentary craft rather than feature-length narrative arc. The Guardian's verdict is polite but firm: the central anecdote about the father carries the film; the surrounding set-pieces around the wider Paris exile community are, in places, more illustrative than revelatory.
That verdict is partly a question of genre. Animation here is asked to do what documentary interview alone could not, which is to make a child's interior weather visible from the outside. When it works, it works spectacularly: the kitchen scene, the notebook pages turning into street maps, the closing image of a hand, presumably Alani's own, folding a recipe into an envelope and dropping it into a letter-box. When it does not, the device begins to repeat. A second sequence, in which older exiles recall the same thursday lunch table in slightly different kitchen colours, does not earn its rhythm the way the first does.
The politics of memory
The reviewer is frank that Flavours of Iraq lands inside a French cultural conversation rather than an Iraqi one. Alani is French: born in France, educated there, working from Paris. The Baghdad he remembers is in some sense his father's Baghdad, transmitted through phone calls and taped recipes and the stubborn self-reinvention of exile. This matters for how the film should be read. It is not a portrait of Iraq in the 1980s so much as a portrait of how an Iraqi past was preserved across a thousand kilometres of mostly broken telephone lines.
That distinction is worth holding on to. In the Western press, Iraqi stories of the Saddam period tend to be told either as atrocity tours through documentary reconstruction, or as testimony in war-crimes proceedings in The Hague or London. Alani, working from within a French left-wing cultural idiom, finds a third register: the kitchen. The Guardian reviewer suggests that in doing so, the film ends up closer, structurally, to the recent generation of European memoirs of lost homes than to the diasporic documentary mainstream. It is a more domestic and less forensic genre.
The film does not shy away from political identification. Alani's father is described in the review as a prominent leftist exile; the film positions its own perspective inside that lineage. The angle from which it looks back at Saddam's Iraq is a family one, which is also a generational one. The result is a piece of cultural work that critiques the regime of memory from inside the community that survived it.
What to watch
Two things are worth flagging for readers tracking how this material circulates. First, the Arabic-language press in Paris and London is unlikely to receive Flavours of Iraq with uniform warmth: the film's choice to centre a French childhood rather than a Baghdad adolescence has already been the focus of community conversations around earlier diaspora work. The Guardian's reviewer is clearly sympathetic; the wider Arabic press verdict is not yet on the record. Second, the reception pattern of French-Iraqi hybrid animation tends to be sharp in the art-house circuits and slow in the festival circuits, with European theatrical windows opening well after the festival bow. As of the 20 July 2026 review date, no wider release schedule is indicated in the source material.
The things that remain uncertain matter. The reviewer gestures at the film's political lineage, but does not measure the documentary evidence the film draws on against other accounts of the same exile community. Sources also do not specify how much animation is original rotoscope and how much is archival photograph re-rendered. A second viewing with credits in hand would settle both questions.
What is clear is that Alani has produced a film whose chosen register, the cookbook as family archive, takes seriously the idea that exile is preserved not in flags or speeches but in a kilo of lamb and a phone ringing at midnight. It is a film of appetite as much as of geography, and it earns its slightly awkward English title on screen even if not in the press.
, Desk note: Monexus framed this review around the structural question of how the Iraqi exile archive is being preserved outside Iraq, particularly through French-language cinema. The Guardian's lede on the father anecdote is foregrounded; the wider festival and box-office context, which the source does not address, is left open.