Mémorial de Caen, Caen
The city of Fallujah, near Baghdad, was at the heart of the Iraq wars for 20 years. It was the birthplace of Sunni guerrilla warfare, destroyed by the US Army, and then the stronghold of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later of the Islamic State.
Feurat Alani, a young French reporter whose family is originally from Fallujah, was introduced to the city at the age of 9, during the embargo of the 1990s. He returned after the US invasion in 2003. For nearly 20 years, he explored the history of the war-torn country through a multifaceted personal work: reports, documentaries, and a graphic novel titled “Fallujah, ma campagne perdue” (“Fallujah, my lost countryside”). Initially conceived as a narrative in 1000 tweets, Feurat Alani’s “Le Parfum d’Irak” (“The Scent of Iraq”) was then adapted into an animated film and later into a graphic novel.
Recently, Feurat Alan publishing a novel, “Je me souviens de Falloujah” (“I Remember Fallujah”), which sheds a different light on this Iraqi history through a fiction centered around amnesia and a father-son relationship.
