A cherub-faced, computer-generated moppet clutches a magic paintbrush and flies high above the city skyline, before coming face to face with a giant rainbow, which then suddenly morphs into an enormous flag, and back again. It’s not the sort of surreal visual whimsy you would expect to see emerging from Baghdad. Yet Abdulbasit Salman’s short film Rainbow is Stronger than War is just that — a quirky and inventive vignette that was showing as part of last year’s hugely successful International Iraq Short Film Festival.

The event, which will be appearing in an abridged “best of” form at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival, includes the humorous and provocative Just Playing, a witty story about a group of young boys playing football next to a minefield. Or there is The Office of Security, an unflinching look at how Saddam’s former torture offices have been transformed into shelters for homeless Iraqis. Or Contradiction, a film that examines the murderous conflict between honey bees and hornets. In each case the films touch on the crisis in Iraq, but they do so with creative ingenuity rather than glum political agitprop.

That is the point, says the Baghdad- based festival organiser Nizar Al Rawi, who almost single-handedly put the original event together last September. Al Rawi, who is part of a collective of artists, designers, sculptors and musicians, explains that with the festival he was trying “to send a message to the world. I was trying to say something about the real Baghdad that we live in. Iraq is about more than terrorism, political problems and war on the streets. I wanted to say that we have a civilisation here, and we have culture. This place, our homeland, is not just some area marked out for war”.

Catherine Day, a UK civil servant who was sent on a cultural factfinding mission to post-invasion Iraq, became close friends with Al Rawi and now acts as a consultant to the Cambridge Film Festival. She says that when she initially heard about Al Rawi’s plans to stage a short film festival in Baghdad she decided to set her qualitative expectations appropriately low. After all, the Iraqi film industry hadn’t produced a movie in years — it had briefly flourished under the propaganda-obsessed Saddam and then collapsed after UN-imposed sanctions banned the import of photographic chemicals.

And yet, when she eventually saw the finished product, she was mesmerised instantly. “These films, taken as a whole, have flashes of brilliant humour in them,” she says. “The film-makers are brave enough not to pull any punches about what they are living through.” Immediately, Day knew that she wanted to bring the festival to Cambridge.

“I wanted people to see the films and have their eyes opened to a place that we’re not normally that interested in, here in the UK. And, ironically, I think that everyone in the UK, in some way, is partially complicit in everything that has been going on in Iraq. So I wanted people, first and foremost, to be interested again.”

The festival also contains a longer film, the documentary montage Dreams of Sparrows. The movie, honest and unsparing about modern-day Iraq, offers unassuming slices of raw tragedy and human comedy, often within the space of a few frames. It was made entirely of daily scenes and dramatic moments culled from the streets of Iraq over a two-year period by the film-maker Haydar Daffar, with a little help from family, friends and camera-carrying acquaintances.

So does all this creative activity, together with James Longley’s recent and equally low-key analysis of life in the war zone, Iraq in Fragments, hint at a genuine renaissance in Iraqi film-making? A positive advance for a culture desperate to find its feet once more? Al Rawi isn’t too sure. He says that he hopes so, but that it’s hard to think of the bigger picture when he’s busy in the middle of organising and attempting to secure European sponsorship for his second Iraqi Short Film Festival — to take place in September or October, again in Baghdad. But yes, he says on reflection. “It’s about looking to the future, isn’t it? The main idea of our festival is dealing with the future. So that has to be a good thing.”

Cambridge Film Festival, various venues(www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk), Jul 6-16

Sand and Stereotypes

ROAD TO MOROCCO, 1942
Not content with having offended everyone in both Singapore and Zanzibar with earlier Road to. . . movies, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby teamed up again to fight for the attentions of the beguiling Princess Shalmar. The camels did more to bring the film to life than either Hope or Crosby.

RAMBO III, 1988
Sylvester Stallone’s one-man killing machine takes on the Russian army as
Afghanistan’s Mujahidin mostly stand idly by. Even President Reagan couldn’t fail to see the propaganda victory of this film.

TRUE LIES, 1994
With Russia in the throes of a meltdown, Hollywood turned to the Middle East and Art Malik for a new crop of evil-doers. The film is mired in stereotypes of Middle Eastern men who prey on liberal Western agonies.

THE SIEGE, 1998
Edward Zwick’s warning to white America arrives with all the subtlety of a Klan rally. Arab terrorists want to blow up New York; in turn, the city’s Arab population is rounded up into Guantanamo Bay-style camps.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, 2000
Samuel L. Jackson’s US Marines open fire on a large crowd of Yemenis, killing 83 men, women and children. The Yemenis, unsurprisingly, are portrayed as rabidly anti-American.