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Abstract 

The new millennium's migration movements have created increasingly pluralistic European societies, displaying a high level of both religious and ethnic diversity (Castles et al. 2014, Pew Research Center 2017, Furseth et al. 2019, Illman, Martikainen & Nynäs 2018, Körs 2018, Axelson & Stier, 2020). Scholars from different fields describe how tensions in culturally diverse societies are played out and how different groups with religious and secular world views are sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in conflict (Lundby 2018, De Kadt 2018, Pratt 2018, Göndör 2017).

Also, film directors get themselves engaged in these issues and try to capture how life looks in the age of migration (Castles, Haas & Miller 2014, Trifonova 2020). One of the more recent and interesting films on this topic was made by a Swiss-Iraqi director Samir Jamal Aldin. The director presented his film Baghdad in my Shadow (2019) at the international film festival in Locarno, Switzerland, in August 2019. In this fiction film, the director invites us to a group of people with a multicultural background, rooted in various geographical areas, embodying a mixed cultural heritage, including religious traditions of different kinds. In a thriller format, he describes a family story with roots in Saddam Hussain’s Iraq during the 1980s and the 1990s, loosely based on his own Iraqi background. 

The aim is to analyse Baghdad in my Shadow (2019) through theoretical perspectives on the re-negotiation of identities and migrant experiences in contemporary, multi-religious Europe. The director address charged matters and discusses issues related to tensions between diverse identity positions within a migrant family in a minority community. He shows characters taking on liberal gay rights and female emancipative positions as well as characters leaning towards traditional gender roles anchored in socio-centric world views. He also shows generational tension between secularized Muslim identities in the elderly generation in struggle with young relatives attracted to conservative Salafism.

The aim is furthermore to analyze audiovisual storytelling through theories on media as framing and amplifying complex issues in contemporary society, including religious affiliations. I will especially dwell on aspects on storytelling’s capacity to engage its audience through emotional engagement. Finally I will also tap in to the film’s capacity to stir up emotions in real-life dialogue between the director and the film’s audience, exemplified by situations taking place during the screening of the film at Malmö Arab Film Festival (MAFF) on 9th of October 2020.