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part of
double bill #28
The Motherfucker’s Birthday
Glasgow Short Film Festival
2025
Bucharest Int’l Experimental Film Festival
2025
Through dancing, The Motherfucker’s Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance.
If you try to live a good life, if you consider yourself and those around you with kindness and compassion, if you remain on guard against wickedness at all times, you may still find, at the end of all this good work, some motherfucker dancing on the ashes of everything you built. The crime that stands out most painfully in the stories of places that exist under the thumb of one or more criminal rulers is the theft of the act of celebration. Those who liberate themselves can seldom dance and cheer without one eye on the door, already dreading what (or who) comes next.
In The Motherfucker’s Birthday, the haunted sentimentality of old images is cut with an acerbic punk grammar. Regardless of their sandbox nature, films that address the archive often serve as a reminder of the non-plastic quality of reality: we can’t change what was done to us. But from our present moment—beaming each other images of tired people cheering under skies streaked with rockets, singing and dancing with strangers in streets lit by police lights, testifying to each other and the world with no room for polite language—we can change how we talk about it.
Bio Saif Alsaegh
Saif Alsaegh (Iraq/USA) is a filmmaker born in Baghdad in 1991. His work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Iraq, growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the US landscape where he currently lives. After completing undergraduate studies in journalism in Iraq, he relocated to the USA and received an MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2019). His films, such as Bezuna (2023), 1991 (2018), and Motorola Jockeys (2016), have screened in festivals and venues worldwide. His volume of poetry, Iraqi Headaches, was published in 2013. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he is a lecturer at California State University, Fullerton.
Saif Alsaegh’s punchy found-footage remix is built on a seemingly contrasting principle – the juxtaposition of images of Iraqis dancing and the violence of Saddam’s dictatorship in the country. But the sense of eeriness in the film comes not from these confrontational images; by now, live-streamed genocide has become part of our everyday image culture. The discomfort is rather felt in how seamlessly these scenes of spectacle spill into one another to the point of conceptual obscurity. One man’s twists become another man’s kicks of humiliation. In a political regime based on domination, each body is a controlled object of and for violence; a blurring of lines between pain and pleasure as a final descent into madness.
Recently, signs of a cinematic revival have begun to emerge from Iraq: a symptom of a society that, after such a bloody end and beginning of the century, is starting to process its traumas through artmaking. It’s remarkable that two films about the Saddam regime appear in a single year, specifically about one particular facet of the cult of personality practiced by the Ba’athist dictator. Hasan Hadi’s feature The President’s Cake and Saif Alsaegh’s The Motherfucker’s Birthday (2024) both address the pharaonic birthdays organised for Saddam Hussein. In a confined space (and so, with a certain puissance), Alsaegh juxtaposes images of mass celebrations with testimonies about the oppression of dissidents, creating a contrast between the propagandistic spectacle – the (macabre) dances and orchestrated festivities—and the brutal reality of torture and repression.