Immortals (2024) ‘CPH:DOX’ Movie Review: Doc on Iraq Protests Grips Only Sporadically 

Immortals (2024) ‘CPH: DOX’ Movie Review: What does it mean to be young and radical and wholly disaffected with the structures of family and government? To what point can you hold yourself from snapping and registering direct, unequivocal protest? Systems of discrimination and oppression can continue unabated unless there are firm checks and balances. The 2019 uprising that was led by a new generation of youths and rocked Iraq sought to challenge and undermine sectarian systems that were instituted with the 2003 US invasion.

The intervention left in its wake permanent residues over the nature and character of Iraqi polity, triggering a vicious divisiveness. This is what the uprising that unfurled on the Tahrir Square attacked. Maja Tschumi’s documentary, “Immortals,” takes us back to the bloody protests that claimed close to eight hundred lives and its eventual fallout through the perspective of two people who survived to tell the tale.

Divided into three chapters, the film opens with twenty-two-year-old Melak Madhi, who now calls herself Milo. After the protests ended, she was locked up at home for a year. Her father, who calls the shots in the family, burnt everything that ever belonged to her, including all her clothes, in an effort to wipe out her identity entirely. She puts on her brother’s clothes and starts sneaking out.

Donning a projected masculinity in her attire grants her privileges, even though it comes at a cost. She admits to hating pretending to be a boy, feeling more at home in her femininity. To slip on this poseur’s identity, she is compelled to bury her emotional edges. She yearns to escape from Iraq and seek asylum elsewhere, but her father has burnt her passport as well. The proof of a copy emerges from a pressing need that can help seal her flight.

In the second chapter, the viewer is hurled into the roiling center of the uprising that changed Milo’s life forever. The other protagonist comes to the fore. Mohammed al Khalili hasn’t much going for him until he takes a camera and decides to film the protest. The camera occupies the critical role of holding witness. Khalili talks of how his new role gives him a sense of identity which he has always struggled to establish.

It lends him meaning and purpose, whereas previously, he found himself weak and insubstantial. He, who was socially awkward, suddenly found himself armed with the confidence to communicate with utter strangers on the memorializing urgency of his camera. Slowly, he became so entrenched in the protest site he could not find in himself how to fully disengage from it long after it disbanded. Chaos and bursts of violence he had encountered at close quarters linger and permeate his thoughts and dreams, refusing to dislodge themselves. It’s not something he is able to shake off and cursorily shift attention elsewhere.

Khalili’s handheld video footage places the viewer right in the middle of the protests that are capable of taking violently unpredictable turns at any given moment. Instead of being terrified into completely backing off, the situation drives Khalili to capture even more furiously and persistently. Wrath, despair, and dissatisfaction of the masses ring through in the footage, some of which have been dramatically re-enacted.

There’s a dizzying, heart thudding force and fury in these scenes that feel suitably explosive and spilling over with high stakes. The public has reached a saturation point of tolerating the regime’s ways; they don’t hesitate to dare to put their lives on the line and make their dissent be heard emphatically. While the two chapters individually work, it is in the final jarringly rushed stretch where Tschumi seems to lose her grip. When the film circles back to Milo after the detour, it no longer feels particularly invested or committed in actually following up with her story. In trying to hop between the two primary characters, the film loses its bearing.

How does repression interact across private and public domains? While it is admirable that the film resists the usual explanatory, context-laying mode and throws us into the deep end of things, it requires a spirit of interrogation on such counts.

Immortals premiered at the CPH: DOX Film Festival 2024.

Immortals (2024) Movie Links: IMDb