By Minyi Jiang
In 1951, Maurice Sawda’i, an Iraqi Jew, left Baghdad for Israel and worked as an assistant editor on an Israeli film production team. In an unpublished memoir, he wrote, “I hoped to realize my dreams of becoming a great film director. However, at the end of this journey, the fact of working as a small contributor in a big cinema project left me depressed.”
Sawda’i went from the top of the film business in his country of birth to starting over.
“I realized at once how far I was from success. Not anymore, the son of Me’ir, the mover and shaker of the Baghdad Film Studio whose words were obeyed by the highest and lowest ranks of employees.”
University of Oslo Middle East cultural historian Pelle Valentin Olsen showing historical records of cinemas in Iraq at a recent UCSB event sponsored by the Film and Media Studies department, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the History department.
University of Oslo Middle East cultural historian Pelle Valentin Olsen recounted the story of the Sawda’i family at a recent event sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s Film and Media Studies department, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the History department. The Sawda’i family pioneered the construction of cinemas and established the first Iraqi film studio in the 20th century.
“The example of the Sawda’i family really [highlights] the importance of Iraqi Jews in the first several decades of Iraqi cinema, as well as the intersection of local, regional and international networks of capital, expertise and technology that shaped cinema in Iraq,” Olsen said.
The three Sawda’i brothers, Ezra, Me’ir, and Hayyawi, grew up in their grandfather’s large house in Baghdad. Through caravan trade with Syria and Iran, their grandfather amassed a fortune as a wealthy merchant who transported goods from Aleppo to Baghdad in the winter and from Isfahan to Baghdad in the summer.
When caravan business became obsolete, the brothers convinced the grandfather to import sugar and tea to Iraq. Following their grandfather’s death in 1926, legal battles over inheritance and embezzlement allegations led the brothers to seek new business ventures.
Portrait of the Sawda’i family in Baghdad, painted by Me’ir’s son, Eli Sawda’i. Ezra, Me’ir and Hayyawi Sawda’i are in the back row, from left to right.
Me’ir, the eldest and most entrepreneurial of the three, tried his hand at several businesses, including importing radios, opening a poultry factory, a sugar factory, a transport company and importing automobiles from Europe. But many of these ventures were short-lived, and the global economic crisis of the 1930s brought the brothers close to bankruptcy.
During this time, the brothers received an offer to rent Cinema Central in Baghdad for a low price. With the help of Hayyawi Sawda’i's connections in Iraqi nightlife and other wealthy Iraqi families, the brothers were able to raise funds. In 1932, a partnership was formed between the Sawda’i brothers and the Danus family, another Iraqi Jewish family of cinema entrepreneurs, and together they reopened Cinema Central.
When this partnership ended, the brothers formed a new partnership with the al-Messih family, a wealthy Iraqi Christian family, and built a cinema on Al-Rasheed Street in Baghdad. They began importing and distributing films from the U.S. and Europe, Olsen said.
In 1935, they obtained the rights to exhibit and distribute five United Artists films in Iraq and Iran, but prior to that they showed pirated films by American companies, taking advantage of the lack of copyright law in Iraq.
During World War II, while British troops camped in Iraq, the Sawda'i imported 100 second-hand projectors from India. They secured a contract to supply films and establish cinemas in the British military camps throughout Iraq.
Profits gained from this contact allowed the brothers to begin building “Medina Roxy,” or Roxy City, in 1943, Olsen said, a complex with a main cinema, a nightclub, a casino and an outdoor summer cinema.
Cinema Roxy in the 1940s. Photos courtesy of the Sawda’i family.
Cinema Roxy, the largest cinema in Iraq during the 1950s, was also one of the first to have air conditioning. Unlike others who imported their units, Me’ir Sawda'i, an engineer, produced them locally. Me'ir also invented a device in the early 30s to make silent films like Charlie Chaplin's, speak, Olsen said.
In 1946, came Studio Baghdad, the first film studio in Iraq, after the family bought equipment from an English director and producer. Though he found no photos of the studio in family albums, Olsen managed to find one in a memoir of a Turkish director who had rented the studio to produce films in the 1950s.
The first solely Iraqi film produced by the Baghdad Studio was the love story ‘Aliya and ‘Issam, as earlier films were either co-productions with Egyptians or made by European directors. “It's a Romeo and Juliet inspired melodrama, about impossible love between a prince and a princess from different Iraqi tribes,” Olsen said.
The film was well received in Iraq, but the profits didn’t cover high production costs, Olsen said, the studio had to fire the original French director who deliberately delayed the film.
The French director took revenge by writing a letter to a local newspaper in which he wrongly accused the Sawda’i family of spying for Israel. In fact, a year earlier the family had also been wrongly accused of spying, in a Jordanian newspaper. Luckily, the family's connections to Iraqi elites protected them from consequences, said Olsen. “But of course, not all the Iraqi Jewish families were connected, and many went to jail during this period.”
Baghdad Studio’s later films flopped. In 1950, the studio suspended operations, and the brothers began dubbing foreign films into Arabic and Persian and renting out the studio to foreign directors.
Poster of Aliya and ‘Issam, the first Iraqi film produced in Baghdad Studio.
Poster of Aliya and ‘Issam, the first Iraqi film produced in Baghdad Studio.
Between 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel and other countries, Olsen said, and the film industry suffered from the migration. But the three Sawda’i brothers stayed in Iraq until they passed away in the 60s and 70s. Their children had left Iraq for Israel, Iran, and the United States in earlier years. But they generally found careers in the film industry to be a disappointment in Israel and Iran, after what they had known in Iraq.
Minyi Jiang is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Middle East Studies and pursuing a minor in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.