WARNING: This review contains spoilers for the film.

Between 1950 and 1952, over 120,000 Jews left their homes in Iraq and emigrated to Israel. It was the culmination of a decade-long rise in pro-Nazi, pan-Arab sentiment and persecution that infected Iraq. In the 1940s, around one-third of Baghdad was Jewish. In less than two years, a 2000-year-old Diasporic community, one of the oldest in the world, was almost completely uprooted. The Jewish population in Iraq dwindled to the hundreds, and several generations later, it dropped down to single digit numbers. The Dove Flyer [2013], an Israeli film directed by Nissim Dayan, treats this historical rupture not as a retrospective tragedy, but as a lived reality unfolding in real time– messy, contingent, and largely unheroic. 

Based on Eli Amir’s semiautobiographical novel, the film transports viewers to Baghdad in the final days before its Jewish community’s expulsion. It’s within this backdrop that Nissim Dayan weaves a powerful coming-of-age story, dramatizing these events as seen through the eyes of 17-year-old Kabi, played by Daniel Gad, as he navigates a city brimming with political tension and cultural rupture. 

At the start of the film, the Iraqi police tear up Kabi’s family home, searching for Zionist contraband. Kabi’s uncle Hazkel, his face badly beaten, is taken into custody. Hazkel’s wife Rachelle (Yasmin Ayun), a beautiful young woman just a few years older than Kabi, becomes distraught with anguish—and for good reason. After the establishment of the state of Israel, Zionism, never permissible in Iraq, had become a crime punishable by death. 

Hazkel’s arrest sets the plot in motion, and before long, Kabi finds himself drawn into the Zionist underground. He gains a firsthand understanding of the predicament of Jews in Baghdad as his personal life becomes increasingly swept up in uncontrollable sociopolitical forces. The film deliberately blurs the line between Kabi’s coming-of-age and the community’s unraveling; his induction into political life is less a moment of conviction than a slow build-up of pressure and necessity.  

Soon, Kabi sneaks into the prison where his uncle is being held– disguised as a tea vendor– and of course, carries copious bribes for the guards expecting him. Hazkel has no illusions about his fate; when Kabi asks Hazkel what message to give to Rachelle, his uncle instructs him to tell her that he’s fine and will be released soon. “Lie to her,” he bluntly instructs Kabi. 

Kabi, meanwhile, is dealing with his own unrequited crush on Rachelle, while also courting Amira (Inbal Nir), the daughter of his upstairs neighbor Abu Adwar, played with tenderness and gravitas by Uri Gavriel. As a “dove flyer” or, alternately, “pigeon handler,” Abu Adwar raises pigeons and sells them stuffed with fragrant rice, as a delicacy, to the elite of Baghdad.

Amira has become active in the Zionist underground and her brother Adwar (David Shaul) feels drawn towards Communism. Abu Adwar opposes both the Zionists and the Communists. He maintains faith in the status quo and believes that the Jews will continue to be an integral, inextricable part of Iraqi society. “Israel doesn’t belong to us,” he tells Kabi. “Israel belongs to other Jews.”  The film’s strength lies in its refusal to impose a single narrative. The characters are entangled in overlapping ideologies– Zionism, Communism, royalist nationalism– without the luxury of moral clarity.

Through Kabi’s eyes, the viewer gets a crash course in these competing ideologies and the events that marked the turning point for Jewish life in Baghdad. Throughout the film, we witness various imprisonments and public hangings, the bombing of a crowded synagogue, and Iraqi Jews smuggling themselves in trucks across the border to Iran, en route to Israel. We witness the arrival of Palestinian refugees in Baghdad along with the defeated Iraqi Army at the conclusion of Israel’s War of Independence. All of this culminates with Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, the mass airlift to Israel. The 1941 Farhud is never spoken of— only alluded to— but the pogrom’s grim legacy hangs over the proceedings.

Towards the end of the film, Dayan stages a conversation between notorious Iraqi prime minister Nuri Al-Said (Makram Khoury) and a fictional Jewish businessman named Abu George (Yossi Alfi). Over dinner, Al-Said offers the Jews the chance to immigrate to Israel before conditions become too unbearable. (In reality, he was not quite so polite about it.) “We Jews are very loyal,” Abu George insists, but to no avail. The scene articulates the asymmetry at the heart of the film: Prime Minister Al-Said was never interested in coexistence, only managing a political problem. In 1950, his government passed the Denaturalization Law, finally allowing Jews to leave the country if they renounced their Iraqi citizenship, along with their property, passports, and rights. What followed was not just mass departure, but organized dispossession. 

The movie distills a lot into its 135-minute runtime. To Dayan’s credit, he avoids weighing down the movie with heavy-handed dialogue or voice-over narration that would spell everything out for the audience. But there is a lot to keep track of, and it’s useful to have some background knowledge going into it. Nevertheless, what the film lacks in narrative clarity, it compensates for in atmosphere– filled with coded glances, neighborhood tension, and bureaucratic menace. Dayan opts for immersion over explanation, trusting the audience to piece together the implications. 

Ultimately, The Dove Flyer is a film that celebrates and eulogizes an accomplished and prosperous Jewish community. The filmmakers faithfully adapt Eli Amir’s novel into a poignant period piece and a highly accurate insider’s perspective of a time and place. Crucially, it is the only narrative film to date written and performed in Iraqi-Judeo Arabic– the distinct dialect spoken by Jews in Iraq for millennium, now nearly extinct.

The choice of language is not ornamental; it anchors the film in reality, in the rhythms and idioms of the world of Iraqi Jewry during this time. Actress Ahuva Keren– who plays Kabi’s mother, Naima– produced the film, translated Dayan’s screenplay into Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, and coached the actors on the correct pronunciation. In addition to Keren, a number of the actors have Iraqi-Jewish heritage themselves, including Daniel Gad and Uri Gavriel. The dusty, lived-in look of the film feels authentic to the era. That authenticity extends to the beautiful, haunting score that pulsates throughout the film and features traditional Middle Eastern instruments such as the duduk and the oud.

Dayan ends the film with a shot of a long line of Iraqi Jews boarding a plane leaving Iraq, taking only what they can carry. Their departure is orderly, almost banal, which only sharpens the devastation. The film ends before that tension is resolved, but the final pages of Eli Amir’s novel provide a glimpse of the aftermath, describing Kabi and his family’s attempts to acclimate to Israel, as refugees, no less. They have lost one homeland, but they have gained a new one.

The film version doesn’t offer any redemptive arc– only devastation. Then again, perhaps what endures is not the story’s resolution, but its voice– the language, the setting, and the world it briefly brings back. ◦

Aaron Cohen is the founding editor of The Parallax Review. A Syrian-Jewish photographer and educator based in Philadelphia, he specializes in long-term projects that explore communities and subcultures. His work has appeared in a number of publications including Time Out New York, GEO, The Sun Magazine, Vice, Time Magazine, LaRepubblica, and CNN.