“I’m at the film festival. I’m at the mall multiplex. I’m at the combination film festival venue/mall multiplex.”

So I tweeted from the Toronto Film Festival this year, in a quick-wink rewrite of Das Racist’s avant-retarde one-liner critique of contemporary global capitalism and cultural homogenization, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Twitter is rarely a venue for deep thoughts, and with that update, I was definitely being cute/glib. But the more time I spend watching allegedly non-commercial films in capitalist cathedrals round the world, the more it seems like there’s something there to this Das Racist analogy.

One of TIFF’s two mall multiplexes, the Varsity, completely reverts to festival screenings during the festival; I’m fairly sure the other, the AMC, gives many screens over to press and public screenings but holds on to a few for regular screenings of the usual Hollywood fare. As the mall multiplex becomes an increasingly ubiquitous film festival venue (how many festivals of size can you name that don’t make use of one at all?), it’s the latter tactic that’s more common. The dissemination of ostensible fine art film is only possible on any kind of grand scale thanks to these venues, virtually identical in every city that they appear in around the world, and thanks to their main business trafficking motion picture products that are as divorced from “cinema” as the fare sold at a combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell is divorced from their ostensible Italian and Mexican sources respectively. In a city like Abu Dhabi, that juxtaposition really throws into relief “festivalism,” as it has recently been derogatorily termed by A.O. Scott, as the embodiment of deviance. (See also an amusing alternate definition of Festivalism, involving the “metamorphosis of capitalism into something less predatory, that I found via an accident of Google)

I had one primary, two-part question coming into the MEIFF experience: What does a festival in the UAE spearheaded by star Western film festival talent look like, and who is its audience? In other words, how does the intersection of U.A.E. Resources and American curatorial talent reflect, in a broader sense, the intersection of the Muslim world and global pop and capitalist culture? What I hadn’t quite banked on is the Mall Multiplex factor: despite the obvious cultural differences, MEIFF resembles most regional North American festivals (and, more significantly, major international festival/market hybrids like Toronto and Berlin) in that the bulk of its programming unspools in shopping centers, on screens adjacent to theaters welcoming everyday patrons to everyday cinema fare. Here, as in the States, that everyday fare is apparently overwhelmingly dominated by large Hollywood films.

The lobby of the Cinestar at the Marina Mall in Abu Dhabi seems to always be packed, but the bulk of the local emirate natives (identifiable by “national costume,” which usually means white floor-length dishdashas and red-and-white headdresses for men, and floor-length abayas and headscarfs or burkas, all often black, for the women) seem to be headed down the right corridor, where multiplex business continues as usual, while those in Western dress mostly turn right, towards the four screens that MEIFF has commandeered. I had been told by a festival organizer that one of their challenges in fostering a film culture here is that when natives of Abu Dhabi go to a movie theater, they behave “like it’s their living room” — meaning that they might arrive late and/or leave early, and carry on audible conversations with each other during the film. Hearing it described, I assumed the problem (if you can even safely apply that term to what amounts to a difference in cultural conditioning) was just a degree removed from the situation at an average “urban” multiplex at midnight shows on Friday nights.

And then I sat next to two men in national dress during Saturday’s screening of Son of Babylon, a soft drama co-produced by 8 countries and shot on location in Baghdad and Kurdistan, about the post-Shock and Awe shock and desperation of Iraqis confronting the recent past in the immediate weeks following the fall of Saddam Hussein. For the first twenty or so minutes of the movie, the men next to me kept up a running conversation in Arabic, at a volume perhaps lower than street level but definitely above a whisper. At times they seemed to be arguing about what was happening on screen; sometimes, one would just repeat a line from the film and the other would audibly sigh. And then a character on screen began singing a song about Saddam’s genocidal Anfal Campaign in Kurdistan. The man immediately to my right pointed at the screen, turned to his friend and said, “Kurdistan!” And then both men got up and walked out, leaving their jumbo-size soft drink cups in their cupholders, never coming back to retrieve them.

I don’t pretend to know enough about local attitudes towards the Kurds and the wider situation in Iraq to understand what about this scene would send these men running for the exits; maybe they just had to run down the hall to catch a screening of Surrogates. I can tell you that what they missed made me contemplate running for the exits more than once, though in keeping with *my* cultural conditioning, I dutifully stuck it out. Resembling what might happen if Abbas Kiarostami was given a commission to transpose Germany Year Zero to post-Saddam Iraq with the caveat that if the film failed to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar the director would be billed for its production, Son of Babylon also bears traces of its eight-nation collaboration, in that the various political provocations naturally inherent to the material are pounded into middlebrow mash.

The film follows preteen Ahmed and his grandmother (played by Shazada Hussein, a Kurd whose entire family went missing during Anfal, and who was the sole woman to testify against Saddam at his trial), as they trek across Iraq in search of Ahmed’s father, a soldier who was imprisoned at Nasariyah during the war in 1991 and hasn’t been heard from since. As the duo take a convoluted route from the north to Baghdad to Nasariyah to Babylon (made more convoluted by the fact that every car breaks down, and every stranger encountered seems scary but ultimately has a heart of gold), the chaos and confusion, interpersonal conflict and communal despair of “liberated” Iraq are effectively transmitted through the eyes of our preternaturally mature child guide.

This is the kind of film that Oscar foreign language voters love, because it flatters their general liberal guilt without demanding any real prerequisite knowledge of historical fact or the nuance of intra-Iraqi relations — everything is explained, leaving no room for feeling. It also affirms the widely held assumption amongst the U.S. left that while Saddam was bad for Iraqis, the U.S. intervention definitely wasn’t good. Son of Babylon unsurprisingly offers a conception of America where “Michael Jackson is the mayor” and all Americans are “pigs” — that is, barking rednecks who point big guns at old women and kids.

Oddly paced, hyper-shrieky yet emotionally flat, Babylon’s one interesting spin on the contemplation of the many crises of contemporary Iraq is that for the bulk of the film, Ahmed seems to be the sole future-focused soul around. The kid naturally, guilelessly buys into the Bush administration’s propagandist fiction that in a world reduced to ground zero, old disputes can easily be zeroed out, that without Saddam all Iraqis should theoretically be free to move forward, that the U.S. Invasion could give each and every Iraqi a clean slate. Ahmed’s grandma knows better, and in time, Ahmed is forced to put away childish fantasies and learn his lesson — morbidly, mawkishly, amidst mass graves. A braver film would offer this punctured naivete as an allegorical indictment; Son of Babylon settles for the punishment of its heroes.

The thing is, middling though it may be, I think I could stand to see a dozen more films like Son of Babylon, that at least show very recent history in which the U.S. has a stake from the other end of the gun. Whereas, I think I may have seen my fill of documentaries cartoonishly vilifying the last thirty years of U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of self-hating Americans and Brits. But more on The Shock Doctrine tomorrow…