‘Hanging Gardens’ Director Ahmed Yassin Al Daradji Teases New Project, in Which a Theater Director Offends Saddam Hussein (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comNick Vivarelli International Correspondent Iraqi director Ahmed Yassin Al-Daradji — who in 2022 won the Red Sea Film Festival‘s top prize with “Hanging Gardens” — will next direct black comedy ”Madness and Honey Days,” in which an audacious theatre director offends Saddam Hussein on stage and winds up in a psychiatric hospital to avoid a punishment of tongue-cutting followed by the death sentence.
Segueing from “Hanging Gardens,” in which a 12-year-old boy finds a discarded American sex doll amid the Baghdad trash and then becomes caught in military crossfire, Al-Daradji is continuing to work with tropes that stem from the absurdities and atrocities of his home country’s recent past.
Speaking on the sidelines of this year’s Red Sea Fest, the director recalled how the story for “Madness and Honey Days” came to him. “When I was in Baghdad not long ago, I remembered one of my aunts who lost her mind after her husband was killed in the war,” he said adding that when “her mental health got complicated, my parents would not let me visit her.
Then I remembered that there is this deep stigma in the Arab world about being mad.” In “Madness and Honey Days,” after offending Saddam Hussein on stage, a 27-year-old theater director named Salem manages to escape death and the punishment of tongue-cutting by convincing the Ba’athist court of his insanity.
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