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Latif al-Ani, the beloved 'father of Iraqi photography', captured his country in its heyday from the 1950s to 1970s.
When Saddam Hussein took power, al-Ani put down his camera. His photographs form a unique archive showing a cosmopolitan Iraq, before the devastation of war, that many Westerners and even Iraqi people themselves have never seen.
In Iraq’s Invisible Beauty, 86-year-old al-Ani travels across his devastated homeland, accompanied by Belgian-Kurdish filmmaker Sahim Omar Kalifa, in search of the places he once knew and captured on film. On this final trip, he shows his photographs to the people he meets, who cannot believe the vibrant and prosperous Iraq he presents to them.
Al-Ani died in 2021, soon after the completion of this film, which forms a moving tribute to the great photographer and the country he lost.
