Film Pitch Report
Title:
Length
Gener
Budget
Shoot
The Test of Last Khrait
Feature
Arthouse
0
/
Film Story
Logline
In the desolate Hauzha marshlands, a family clings to survival after the death of their last buffalo. As they wait for the rain to return, they encounter ghosts, famine, and the echoes of war buried beneath the cracked earth.
Characters
Jasim, also known as Abu Ali, is a 36-year-old water buffalo shepherd. He was raised by an old woman in the Al Hawizeh marsh after his family was killed during the 1990 South Uprising. Jasim is married to Fatima, and they have three children: Ahmed, Ali, and Zahra.
Fatima, also known as Umm Ali, is a 28-year-old housewife and reed weaver. She lost her parents when she was 10 and was raised by her uncle. She married to Jasim when she was 17 years old.
Ali is a 9-year-old boy who helps his father look after the buffalo. He dreams of becoming a soldier when he grows up.
Hussen is a 7-year-old boy who enjoys playing and looking after the buffalo. He also likes to create buffalo figures from clay.
Zahra is a 3-year-old girl and the youngest child in the family.
The marshes are a strange and magical world, with unique environments, animal and plant organisms, and their relationships with the inhabitants. Among the local beliefs is the existence of “Tantal” in the remote waters. This being has no specific form, but can transform into any shape desired . It is said to harm those who are found alone, and many stories have been woven about its encounters with people.
Synopsis
The climate crisis and political turmoil have devastated the Iraqi wetlands. The Hauzha marsh, once a vibrant cradle of life on the Iran-Iraq border, now lies silent and lifeless. Drought and upstream damming have strangled the Tigris River, and with it, the lives that depended on its waters.
Most of the marsh’s inhabitants have long since fled. But one family remains.
Jasim, 36, lives with his wife Fatima, 29, and their three young sons: Ali ,9, Ahmed ,7, and Hussen ,3. When their last buffalo dies, their fragile lifeline is severed. With no income, no transport, and no outside help, they face a grim decision.
Jasim decides to dismantle their traditional reed house and reassemble it as a makeshift boat—an act of hope and desperation. He dreams that the rains will return, flood the marsh, and carry them to a new life.
As they wait, the family scavenges for food, searching for edible plants, birds, and buried roots. Hunger gnaws at them. Fatigue sets in. The land they once knew becomes unfamiliar, even hostile.
In their wandering, they uncover remnants of past violence—decayed weapons, half-sunken war relics, unmarked graves. The boundary between present and past begins to dissolve. Ghosts emerge. Whispers rise with the wind. What begins as a survival story shifts into something surreal and haunting.
Madness and memory seep into the dry earth. The marsh refuses to let them leave.
🔹 Visual Style & Mood
Location
The Hawizeh Marshes are wetlands located on the Iraq-Iran border, nourished by the Tigris River in Iraq and the Karkheh River in Iran. They support the Central and Hammar marshes, serving as a sanctuary for various species. The Al-Kassarah drains the wetlands and prevent them from becoming a closed saline basin. The Hawizeh Marshes have been inhabited for over 5,000 years by the Marsh Arabs in Iraq and the Hawizeh people in Iran. Small cities within the wetlands belong to both countries and have no border separating them. The areas near the wetlands provide a safe haven for migratory animals, and the wetlands have a significant impact on the Sumerians and Babylonians who once lived there. The wetlands were drained in the early 1990s and later reopened following the war in 2003.
🔹 Themes
- Ecological collapse
- Inherited trauma and memory
- Waiting, abandonment, and hope
- The blurred line between life, death, and haunting
- Rural resilience and familial bonds in extremity
🔹Important event
- Last Buffalo dies.
- Turning the reed house into a boat.
- Encounter the ghost witnessed by the family.
- Finding an AK-47 weapon.
- fire exchange between Jasim and unkwon armed people.
- Preparing a sweet called Khrait.
🔹 Director’s Statement
This film emerges from the slow death of a once-sacred landscape. The Iraqi marshes—mythic, storied, and ancient—are vanishing before our eyes. This is not just an ecological loss, but a cultural and spiritual one.
I want to tell the story of those who remain—those unseen by media, cut off from aid, yet still tethered to the land through memory and necessity. Through a blend of realism and spectral imagery, the film asks: What happens when the land remembers more than we do?
The surreal elements are not fantasy—they’re a continuation of trauma, a language the land speaks when words fail.
Team
Film Director: Sherko Abbas
He is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist and filmmaker. Abbas earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2015. His work explores sonic and visual memory, with a focus on modern memory that relies on recorded materials. Additionally, Abbas is interested in the current geopolitical situation and the impact of climate cricis in Iraqi’s culture.
Abbas’ works have been exhibited and screened internationally including at: Archaic, the Iraq pavilion at the 57th Venice biennale; Theater of Operations, MoMA PS1, New York; May Flames Pave the Way for You, Arsenal gallery, Białystok; Push Festival, Manchester , UK; Towner International, Towner Eastbourne, Eastbourne; Speaking Across Mountains, Middle East Institute, Washington D.C.; Baghdad Mon Amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris; Vernacularity, Alternativa Festival, Gdansk; Estrangement, The Showroom, London.
Also, his moving image works were screened at the Independent Iraqi Film Festival’s online screening, the 38th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Germany, Aashra, Ashkal Alwan Online Film, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin at the Louvre Auditorium in Paris, the Open City Documentary Combined Programme: What Rules The Invisible in London, Visit Festival Het Bos Ankerrui 5-7 in Antwerp, Belgium, Ruya Shop in Baghdad, and Shasha Movies online streaming.