M’s story

An Anonymous Tale of Mistaken Imprisonment and Torture under Saddam Hussein’s Regime

Hand-drawn documentary on paper, inspired by comics. Approx. 195 pages.

In 2006, a young Iraqi man, in Jordan, recounted to Laura Waddington his experience of mistaken imprisonment in a pitch-black cell for two years during Saddam Hussein’s regime. That day, she promised him that she would tell his tale in a film, without revealing his identity. A few years later, unable to find a way and the funds to do so, Waddington decided to teach herself to draw.

“One night, in Brussels, I had a dream that I was drawing M’s account. The next morning, I took a tram to an art shop. I bought two black pens and a small notebook and I began to draw. Not having drawn since I was a child, I imagined that my sketching was temporary, a few pages to give to an illustrator to carry on in place of me. But immediately I liked the improvised nature of the pen with its lack of claim to accuracy, and became interested in the stark gap revealed between M’s words and where my untrained line couldn’t go. Faced with the limits of my comic book-like sketches, I hoped that the reader’s mind would wander into the spaces between and beyond the images, to reflect on the zone of terror that M described alone.”

Laura Waddington, On Mirrors and the Making of M’s Story.

“If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

—Nadezhda Mandelstam

In Lieu of an Artist’s Statement

On Mirrors and the Making of M’s Story

1. The confiding of a tale

M told me his story in Jordan, in 2006. I had travelled to Amman that summer to research a possible film about the war in neighbouring Iraq, and on my first day wandering through the city, I got talking to a young man smoking a cigarette on a balcony, who turned out to come from Baghdad and to have seen my film Border. Jumping up in excitement, he exclaimed, “But I saw your film, one night, by chance, I’ve dreamt of your images! I have to introduce you to some of my Iraqi friends.”

I stayed until mid-November. Every few days, more friends and acquaintances of the Iraqi people whom I came to know, arrived seeking refuge from the killings and chaos of Baghdad. As much as the terrifying anarchy of the present, they spoke to me of their fear that the horrors that ordinary people had endured under Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Western sanctions were going unrecorded, the traces that remained after all the looting and burning were being replaced by new narratives. Some said that Saddam Hussein had destroyed the soul of the Iraqi people. “If you really want to understand what is going on now, tell just one ordinary person’s story from that time,” insisted one of them.

One afternoon, an Iraqi friend took me to have tea with a young couple who had recently fled Baghdad …

Read essay: On Mirrors and the Making of M’s Story

ACCIDENTS OF MATERIAL AND CHANCE: A CONVERSATION WITH LAURA WADDINGTON

By Pamela Cohn, Non-Fiction Journal.

London-born filmmaker Laura Waddington shot her films Cargo (2001) and Border (2004) with a handheld Sony TRV900 mini-DV cam…. In a series of reflective writings about her oftentimes harrowing adventures in filmmaking called Scattered Truth. she asks, “Is it still possible to draw the spectator into a space where they can look at an image for the first time without the uncanny impression they have already seen it and all the images yet to come?” This was a profoundly prescient query considering that only four years after her time in Sangatte, Laura would meet an Iraqi refugee in Amman, Jordan she calls M. As Laura was readying herself to leave the table where she’d shared an afternoon of tea and conversation with M and his wife, he started to share the account of his kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture when he was a teenage soldier completing his military service under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. To protect his identity, Laura kept the lens cap on her camera while recording M’s narrative in its entirety.

Although she endeavoured to, Laura never found a way to portray M’s story in a film. She says: “It wasn’t only due to practical constraints and my unease at depicting torture. My old mini DV cameras, now phased out of production, had allowed each story and the way it should be filmed to emerge gradually, in part out of technical accidents and chance.” Since that was not possible this time, she taught herself to draw and created a graphic novel instead. Are you a river? – M’s Story (forthcoming) consists of M’s verbatim account and the hand-drawn frames that took hold in her imagination. Here, Laura talks about the circumstances that led her to draw M’s tale and the process of discovering the power and “improvised nature of the pen, with its lack of claim to document accurately …

Read interview: Accidents of Material and Chance: a Conversation with Laura Waddington