A few days ago, I finished filming a documentary between Iraq and Lebanon and am currently in the editing phase. The film is about an Iraqi activist figure who has rarely been written about or highlighted, even though she reached advanced positions and was active in popular and militant circles during the 1970s. While speaking yesterday with someone about the project, he asked me: Why didn’t you make a film about a well-known and more symbolic figure?

The question was simple, yet it unsettled me, and I did not have a ready answer. After some thought, I reached a clear conclusion: the mission of a documentary is not limited to shedding light on what is already known or popular—even if that may be more attractive to funders or audiences—but sometimes the filmmaker is the only historian for those who had no one to tell their stories, especially in contexts where history is not recorded regularly or institutionally.

I believe that serious documentation does not seek those whose names have already shone, but rather digs for those who had a genuine impact in their surroundings and then disappeared from the general narrative for various reasons. Here lies the joy of research: restoring recognition to people who remained on the margins despite the weight of their experience.

On another note, in many biographical films, the story is built around a single character presented as the center around which all events revolve. This choice may be understandable commercially or narratively, especially when such works are produced under the pressure of the market or ideological directions. But the problem does not lie in choosing a central character itself—it lies in narrowing the perspective to the point where all the elements that shaped or interacted with that character are erased.

The main character is often portrayed in a coherent and ascending form toward a moment of climax or personal triumph, while the social context is neglected, and history is reduced to individual decisions. This type of construction ignores partners, opponents, and those affected—and sometimes even those who never wanted to be included within the “hero’s story” that the film imposes.

To better understand this issue, I recently read the “Carrier Bag Theory” proposed by the American writer Ursula Le Guin. It assumes that the first tool humans used to tell their stories was not a spear or weapon but a bag. Instead of a story that launches like a missile toward a specific target, we have a story resembling a bag capable of carrying various valuable things: experiences, events, ideas, characters, emotions—without the need for a single conflict that strictly binds them. According to this logic, the story is not built around one conflict or decisive victory. This approach opens the way for a more pluralistic narrative that sheds light on the non-heroic characters surrounding the biographical subject and on the everyday details that do not fall within a conventional dramatic climax.

When a biography is told as a closed heroic narrative, it not only presents an incomplete account but may also produce a form of visual domination over history. This does not necessarily mean abandoning the central figure but rather re-examining those around them.

The last point I want to emphasize in this article concerns the directions of focus. In biographical filmmaking, the focus is usually on major events, decisive decisions, and moments of rise and fall.

But in truth, what makes a character real are not these rare moments, but everything that happens between them—the ordinary days, the simple details, and the small decisions that are rarely celebrated.

Characters are not built from a single moment of heroism but from the accumulation of details. Presenting these spaces in a biography is not a weakness in structure or a slowdown in storytelling; it is an attempt to return to reality as it is—outside the dramatic framing that flattens the experience and turns it into a ready-made curve leading to an ending.

Ali Omar – Documentary Filmmaker