Zahraa Ghandour’s documentary “Flana” is not a film about women as a ready-made subject. It is about something more unsettling: The fraught reality of what it means to be a woman in Iraq. This is a long meditation on a film that took six years to make — and on the lives that made it necessary.

In Iraq, a woman inhabits chambers within herself. 

Inside homes. Within worlds layered by inherited memory – with personal and collective histories intertwined. 

When we try to tell her story — or when she attempts to narrate it herself, sometimes after being persuaded that her life is worth narrating — we fall into the trap of cliché. “The woman” becomes an overused idea, worn thin through repetition. 

In that sense, the Iraqi woman is first a cliché, and only then a person.  

Zahraa Ghandour, who grew up in Baghdad in one of such homes, decided to move alongside the cliché, to walk with it — and then to undo it. To tell the story of a flana,¹ an unnamed woman, and in doing so to make us see what usually goes unseen in the absence of a name. 

Her first feature-length documentary is both a personal reckoning as a daughter and as a woman seeking long-delayed answers, and the moment she, as a director, fully claims a cinematic language of her own. Drawing on her years in television journalism, Zahraa turns her camera inward, into Iraqi homes, searching for girls who were lost simply because they were born girls. 

“Flana” is a story about the social burial of girls. 

Zahraa began working on “Flana” in early 2019, a year that would mark a turning point in Iraq’s recent history: The October uprising, followed by the pandemic, and the political and social aftermath that followed hardened public discourse against women, across state, religious and tribal authorities alike. 

In recent years, Iraqi and international human rights organisations have documented serious and pervasive violence against women and girls — including killings, domestic abuse, sexual violence, forced or child marriage and the erosion of mothers’ custody rights through new legal frameworks — most recently the Ja‘fari Personal Status Code adopted in early 2025. The regression has been staggering, though violence against women has never been an anomaly in Iraq. 

Yet Zahraa worked on her film with deliberate focus, refusing to let these seismic events distract her. The process dispelled years of hesitation she had carried, along with a quiet certainty that her first film would be about women’s lives in Iraq. 

She began with her aunt Hayat, a midwife who helped raise her and who had long been her confidante — the person she turned to when she needed to think out loud. 

From the personal, Zahraa moved toward the collective. “Flana” begins with her, even though she is not someone who likes to speak about herself. Privacy, she says, is a form of freedom. 

Starting from the Inside 

The film begins where most stories do: at home. 

In “Flana,” the home in which it was filmed is not a backdrop. It is a character. 

Zahraa lingers over details that might appear insignificant: a door half open, then shut; laundry strung across a courtyard; a child’s drawing on the wall; old cooking pots; a swing swaying without explanation. Zahraa conveys the intimacy of the space through details that form the daily rhythms of women whose lives are largely contained within their homes. 

The six years of filming are evident in the patience of the images, alternating between Zahraa’s lens and that of cinematographer Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel. Light enters from different angles; movements are small, almost secretive. Time passes quietly, unnoticed. Together, these details hold time — the kind that passes unnoticed by the outside world. Through them, Zahraa furnishes her unsettled bond with this house-character, which she describes as both “a safe roof and a source of fear.” 

Zahraa moves lightly between being a character, a narrator, and a director within the film. 

This is a home she knows well. She grew up and played here for years with her friend and neighbour, Noor. From behind its window, the girl witnessed the moment she lost that friend. Years later, she returned to the same place, standing beside her aunt — who becomes both the narrator and the subject of the story — behind that very same window, confronting her from behind the camera with a voice edged in doubt, asking about her friend’s whereabouts. 

The child/director considers this scene the most difficult of her life. 

In that moment, Zahraa relinquishes the authority of the director and becomes, once again, the frightened child. The camera darkens half of her aunt’s face; suspicion hangs in the light. She does not accuse. She does not judge. She understands that the reality of Iraqi women is more complex than the blame routinely heaped upon them. 

This is where documentary reveals its irreplaceable power. No fictional reconstruction could carry the same weight. The film is not merely a cultural product — it is an event that reshapes its maker’s life. 

“Mothers of Silence”  … The Ghosts of Daughterhood

From the outset, we understand that this home is not neutral in the story of daughterhood or motherhood. It was not only Aunt Hayat’s home; it was the midwife’s house. 

We hear a newborn’s cry before we see anything else. 

Pregnancy and birth are perhaps the most entrenched of clichés. Women have given birth for centuries. 

“For centuries they have given birth to girls, and yet you still reproach them for it.”  

The words echo through the house where one flana after another is born. 

The house thus shifted from being a family home to becoming a public archive, one that held the stories of countless women. As a child, and later as an adult, Zahraa felt those stories competing with her own intimate memories of the place. For years, she carried a sense of shame about it, trying to conceal it so that none of her friends would know — except Noor, who was born there… and lost there too. 

With the logic of the child she once was, and of her friend Noor, Zahraa tells the story of daughterhood for those born female in Iraq. 

From an early age, Zahraa and Noor learned to recognize the silence that followed the birth of a girl. A pause heavy enough to give the name ‘mothers of silence.’ A silence accompanied by urging the woman who has given birth to scream at the top of her lungs, as though this was the only moment she is permitted to raise her voice. 

The film captures how a woman is revered while pregnant; how her body dominates conversation; and, how the midwife herself confesses regret that she never “completed” herself by giving birth, though she delivered most of her extended family and beyond. 

A woman becomes important if she carries and delivers, even if the pregnancy nearly kills her! 

Without erasing the difficulty of childbirth from the film’s narrative, Zahraa shifts our gaze, and our awareness, toward the stark ease with which daughters are abandoned. 

As it encounters the sanctification of woman-as-pregnant and woman-as-mother, the film weaves together different stories of girls who first saw the light in that house — only to be abandoned later for no reason other than that they were girls. 

A film that begins and ends with mothers in the act of giving birth gradually becomes a story about the absence of motherhood, about the ghosts of daughterhood. 

Noor was left at the door of a shelter after being adopted by a family for ten years — until they tired of her, the way one tires of something cheap, or “free.” 

And Natalie, whose mother left her at her grandfather’s house because her husband told her, “throw her away.” The same husband, Natalie’s father, would later take her back from her grandparents, convince her that her mother had died, and eventually cast her into the street. 

Clichés? Stories from the movies? 

Natalie unsettles what we take for granted about motherhood and fatherhood. More than once, she returns to the question, with the clarity of a child — like Zahraa herself throughout the film — what do parents owe their daughters? What do those roles actually mean? 

She does not search for excuses. She does not diminish her self-worth. She refuses the spiral of guilt and shame. She draws a line between her responsibility and theirs: 

“It’s not my job to look for my mother. I’m her daughter — not her mother.” 

Their neglect does not cancel their responsibility. Their abandonment does not change the fact that they are her parents — a fact no society can substitute. 

“Poor Things… Helpless Girls”: Narratives Beyond Cliché (and Beyond the Western Gaze) 

“How did you face all that terror without your mother?” 

This is how Zahraa asks Noor, her absent friend, how she lived through the US-led bombardment of Baghdad in 2003. 

Again, it is the child’s logic that carries the weight of history. 

In that single question, Zahraa condenses the complexities of growing up through the UN-imposed sanctions of the 1990s, the Gulf War, the invasion, the fall of Baghdad, and the fragile architecture of what followed — the so-called “new Iraq.” 

Through the stories of missing girls across intersecting and fractured times, the film quietly narrates Iraq’s social and political history. 

The home gives way to the city. We leave the house and enter Baghdad’s streets. We see Baghdad at different hours of the day. The city is filmed in pale light, accompanied by unsettled music, as if conveying how women feel in its streets. Women who have lost the city twice: once to occupation, and once to a patriarchal order that narrowed their presence within it. 

It was not easy for “Flana” to secure financial and technical support from foreign institutions whose understanding of post-2003 Iraq, and of Iraqi women, often rests on fixed binaries and stereotypes. Nor was it easy for Zahraa, working within an Arab film industry that increasingly seeks stories of the “strong Arab woman,” the heroine, the fighter, to make a film that resists such binaries. 

“Flana” does not offer weak mothers or heroic daughters. It does not stage a battle between family and individual, state and citizen. Instead, it presents a tangled narrative in which politics, society and personal memory cannot be separated. 

For Zahraa, the process of making the film — development, funding, production, distribution — was itself an attempt to hold onto her own voice. To speak about what she sees unfolding before her eyes. About girls and women thrown into the street — or into the trash — as if they were bodies without stories. About what she calls the “noise” surrounding narratives that claim to speak for her. 

They are victims. They are survivors. They do not need to choose one. 

Rather than preoccupying itself with fixed definitions, “Flana” gives space to Iraqi life in all its intimacy and complexity, allowing the accumulated violence of decades to be interpreted from within. The film presents Iraqi individuals as shaped by, and embodying, all these layered identities at once. 

The political context appears throughout the film, sometimes as backdrop, sometimes directly, such as archival footage showing the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. The intention is clear: the Iraqi man is not portrayed as a monster produced by a single moment. 

The same complexity applies to Iraqi women. The film shows that they are not always neutral within cycles of violence passed down across generations, violence directed both at them and at their children. This is especially visible in the shelter for abandoned girls, referred to by the girls themselves simply as “the home.” 

Girls Pushed Out of All Homes 

“Flana” does not absolve Iraqi society, nor the post-Baath state, of responsibility for girls abandoned by their families. 

Zahraa, who had previously reported on stories of girls living in shelters during her work as a journalist, persisted until she obtained permission from the Iraqi Ministry of Labour to film inside one of Baghdad’s shelters. She was searching for answers that had lingered for years: 

“What happened to Noor’s file? What became of the girls who were here? Why are girls confined for years?” 

Even with official permission, the shelter refused to allow her to film the girls or conduct interviews with them. She was permitted a formal interview with the director of the institution, and later warned against publishing even the material she had filmed legally. 

Everything must be contained; this is a general approach by the overall Iraqi system, in particular when it comes to women. 

From family homes to state shelters, accountability remains elusive. 

Zahraa turns instead to fragments — moments of disorder, to record glimpses caught on surveillance screens, hurried testimonies from the girls.  

Yet most of what these girls endure remains unseen. 

In the final cut, she removes the official interview. What remains are the girls’ brief words, supported by Natalie’s testimony from her years inside “the home.” 

A “home” in the heart of Baghdad, and in other Iraqi cities, where girls are “left between two corridors they walk for years,” under twenty-four-hour surveillance. 

“Why are they imprisoned while those who harmed them walk free?” 

The question echoes through the film. 

The state claims to protect abandoned girls by confining them — sometimes for years — rather than holding accountable the families and communities who discarded them. And so the question extends outward: 

Why are women always punished, or subject to punishment, even when they are victims? 

Punishment takes many forms. Even in the shelter. Even for girls no older than five. 

Natalie, who spent years inside the shelter as a child, returns to it in the film. Her presence as a survivor is not defined simply by leaving the institution. It lies in her ability to critique it from the outside — to refuse to remain confined by it. “Flana” does not name this resistance or survival. It simply observes it. 

Deliberate starvation, for example. 

Iraq’s history of starvation during the UN-imposed sanctions of the 1990s is not distant memory. Yet those memories did not deter the administrators of institutions, such as girls’ shelters, from using deprivation as punishment against a generation born decades after the sanctions. 

Natalie was sometimes denied food as punishment. She was also denied a mother who could teach her to cook. Denied guidance as she grew. 

And yet one of the most charged scenes in the film shows her cooking in her own apartment, learning, even from social media, reclaiming the kitchen not as confinement, but as skill, as autonomy. 

“Flana” does not ignore the kitchen. It turns toward it. Toward cooking, utensils, preparation, not as stereotype, but as terrain. A space of intimacy. A place that can hold survival. 

“Your place is the kitchen” becomes something else entirely. 

Not Only About Them 

“We don’t know how to reach these women.” 

It is a phrase we often hear trying to investigate issues related to women in Iraq. 

In a society where many women fear tribal authority, physical violence, and killings without accountability, as well as online harassment, anonymity becomes protection. It is no coincidence that many Iraqi women use pseudonyms online. 

In this context, making a cinematic documentary like “Flana” is not simply difficult. It is, in many ways, implausible. 

Zahraa pursued documentary filmmaking from childhood, influenced by watching the documentaries produced after the 2003 invasion, and encouraged by her mother, who once told her: “You can do anything you love.” 

In cinematic documentary filmmaking, unlike television documentaries, Zahraa found space for feelings. For silence. For duration. Information recedes; sensation remains. That slowness is not aesthetic indulgence; it is ethical necessity. These stories are fragile. Exposure carries cost. 

Trust had to be built. Carefully. Patiently. 

Natalie had already faced online bullying after speaking briefly on a television report about the shelter before “Flana” was made. The backlash targeted her words and her appearance. When Zahraa first approached her about the film, she refused. 

Only after long conversations, and the sense that this film could be hers too, did she agree. A place to speak. To restore something of herself. 

Physical risk also shaped the film’s release.  

Zahraa waited until Natalie had left Iraq before screening it. She considered her aunt’s safety. She fears backlash — legal, moral, physical against herself — when the film circulates in Iraq. 

The feeling of insecurity is not new to Zahraa. Not as an Iraqi woman. Not as a documentary filmmaker.  

During the war against ISIS, she wanted to “jump with the camera” like her male colleagues. She could not. Safety dictated otherwise. 

In such context, producing a documentary by women can also be more expensive. Sometimes, male crew members are hired not for artistic necessity, but for protection. The cost of moving through public space safely becomes part of the production budget. 

And yet the same social restrictions that limit women’s mobility can allow women filmmakers access — emotional and physical — to spaces closed to men. 

That intimacy defines “Flana.” It lingers over adornment, self-care, cooking, movement through the city. It feels close. It is not a film about women. It is a film made with them. 

Since its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in autumn 2025, “Flana” has received acclaim and awards recognising its artistic and substantive clarity. 

At home, it will encounter familiar accusations: that women’s stories are fashionable; that  

the film exaggerates the reality of Iraqi women, claiming that “malls are full of women”; that its success depends on a trend; that Zahraa herself is not fully Iraqi since she’s “half Lebanese.” 

These accusations against the film and its director reveal that there is a problem, a dilemma, with women being women in Iraq… and in many other places.  

Zahraa Ghandour’s “Flana” only confirms and refutes this at the same time: It began with the birth of a girl and ended with the birth of another. Girls who will grow up to tell stories that will remain ‘trendy and cliché,’ yet as Zahraa wanted for her friend Noor, they will no longer be just flanas.