June 1, 2002
6:00 PM - Theater 2
150 Seats

2001 USA and FRANCE, 63min
English
Director, Joel Soler

A fascinating and surrealistic portrait of the megalomaniac behind the self-created myth of Saddam Hussein and the machinations of his dictatorial reign. Includes unique footage and interviews with people in Saddam's inner circle, including his cousin, his personal filmaker and his architect.

THE usual method involves hook and line, but when Saddam Hussein fancies a day on the river he packs high explosives. Film smuggled out of Baghdad shows the Iraqi dictator using hand grenades to catch fish. Part of a documentary previewed in Washington, the footage shows Saddam lobbing the grenades into a lake and his servants scooping up the dead fish as they float to the surface.

His technique is reminiscent of the former Soviet Union, where leaders enjoyed shooting bears chained to trees. A fitting recreation for the "butcher of Baghdad", his fishing method is one of several eccentricities revealed in Uncle Saddam, a documentary by Joel Soler, a French journalist.

Saddam, one of the world's longest-serving dictators, is so preoccupied with
personal hygiene that he lectures officials obsessively on how often they should shower. "It is preferable to bathe twice a day," he is seen telling the mayor of one city.

Women should wash more than men, he adds, "because the female is more
delicate than the male and the female smell is more distinctive". He goes on: "If a woman cannot afford to brush her teeth with toothpaste or a toothbrush, she should use her finger." To illustrate the point, he rubs an index finger in front of his mouth.

For Saddam, whose iron grip on Iraq was unshaken by his humiliating defeat in the Gulf war in 1991, washing is an important issue if only because the
conventional style of greeting the great man is to kiss him near each armpit.

Saddam also offers tips about housekeeping. In one sequence he is seen
pontificating about the best method for cleaning carpets. Use paraffin, he says.

Soler spent two months filming in Iraq. What started as a film about the impact of economic sanctions turned into "an investigation into the nature of evil", he said.

To catalogue some of Saddam's more surreal behaviour, Soler was able to
smuggle out film clips from local archives. He also secretly filmed some of Saddam's palaces, despite the constant vigilance of Iraqi minders who warned him that filming the president's homes without permission was punishable by death. United Nations inspectors suspect that Saddam hides facilities for producing biological and chemical weapons in some of his homes.

The dictator's biggest obsession, however, is his own glory and the monuments he is erecting to immortalise his reign. This appetite for construction on a grandiose scale has not been diminished by the country's economic woes.

While his people are suffering appalling privations, including a lack of food and medicine, Saddam is engaged in increasingly exotic projects to enshrine his dubious legacy in concrete. Among them is a structure reminiscent of the tower of Babel, designed to commemorate the country's endurance of sanctions.

A local architect claims in the film that he has been contracted to make this monument higher than the Eiffel Tower. "Saddam believes that by building all these things he will endure in history," said Soler. "He really believes he is a hero and that the people will come to look back on him as a very great man."