143 Seconds

When the Iraq Film Archives were destroyed by US bombs during the 2003 war a journalist rescued eight scraps of celluloid from the wreckage totalling 143 seconds In 2004 ICARP the Iraq Coalition Archives Restoration Project announced that it intended to use these scraps to painstakingly reconstruct what was once considered the greatest collection of Arab Cinema in the world Here are the first six restorations including Al Mas Ala AlKubra Mohamed Shukri Jameel 1983 an epic about the 1920s uprising against British colonial rule starring Yousef alAny and Oliver Reed and Al Ayyam AlTawila Tewfik Saleh 1980 based on an autobiographical novel by Saddam Hussein