Marking ten years since the US and UK led invasion of Iraq, Reel Iraq 2013 was a huge endeavour, with over 50 events in 9 cities throughout the UK.

Krystelle Bamford in Erbil, 2013

On our last day in Erbil, the sun came out after days of heavy rain so we decided to capitalize and head into the market place around the Citadel to do some serious rug-buying (I had an embarrassingly large suitcase to fill). We’d had word that there was a carpet shop to beat all carpet shops tucked away somewhere in the warren of vendors (but was it the first right past the tea shop or the second?). We spent an hour spiraling outward from the Citadel, past what felt like a hundred perfectly excellent carpet shops, only to arrive back where we began, carpetless. We wound up buying our rugs at the very first shop we visited, but we also picked something up along the way that will outlast the rugs, as lovely as they are:

Ryan stopped to talk to an older man selling what looked like large potato peelers, with tightly coiled springs in place of blades. They were laid out in a variety of colours on the pavement but I think Ryan was more interested in buying the promotional material (a model brandishing his potato peeler-cum-hair removal device in a manner so smarmy it would have made Justin Bieber blush). Ryan tried the device, and while we were laughing at his subsequent pain, the man pulled Dan up to him and pointed at Dan’s blue eyes and then at his own blue pair. We’re twins, he said, we’re brothers. He brought two fingers together to illustrate. We’re all brothers beneath the skin.

Krystelle’s carpet

I’m cringing a wee bit as I write this because I’m aware it sounds like a load of mush (not his words but mine). But it seemed to point to something startlingly true, and it seemed truer because it wasn’t asked for, because it wasn’t on a podium, because he didn’t know who we were and had no real obligation to be nice to us. He summed up the entire week of meeting strangers, listening to their words, struggling to echo them and then finding that they were already a part of you—a process, I think, that makes strangers into friends— inadvertently and perfectly. I remember reading once that it’s an impoverished imagination that makes people into symbols and so I realize I’m in danger of making this man, whose name I never got, into a plaster saint. I’ll say this though: He had a kind face, he laughed at us quite a bit, he knew we weren’t going to buy anything, he had Dan’s eyes. He didn’t want his photo taken so I don’t have a visual for this post, but as a very poor substitute, have included one of my rug.

First published on Reel Festivals website on February 7th, 2013.