
Iraq's Forgotten Children: The Scrap Collectors of Mosul
Mosul still shows the wounds of the ISIS occupation, with entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble years after the militant group's ouster in 2017. This film follows three boys, Razzan, Hameed, and Maher, from Harmat, a district known for families that had ties to the Islamic State. Hameed's and Maher's fathers were IS members, one arrested, one dead, and Razzan, whose own father was beaten by IS fighters, now looks after both of them. Every day the boys pick through collapsed buildings for scrap metal and plastic to sell, work that pays for food and rent but also exposes them to unexploded ordnance buried in the ruins. Neither the Iraqi government nor international aid organizations reach them, and their family history marks them as outcasts in their own city. The camera stays close to their daily routine, showing the physical toll of the labor alongside the boys' quiet insistence on doing it well. It is a portrait of children left to support themselves in a city still sorting out who belongs and who does not.