On Sunday evening I had the distinct privilege of attending a director Q&A screening of Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez’s My Lost Country, organised as part of the SAFAR Film Festival taking place in cinemas up and down the UK. The festival shines a spotlight on directors and creators working in contemporary Arab cinema, but the crux of Yasin Gutiérrez’s affecting, stream-of-consciousness documentary is the uneasiness of her relationship to her Iraqi identity.

Much of Yasin Gutiérrez’s life has been underscored by political turmoil and fragmentation. Her parents’ exile from Iraq under the premiership of Saddam Hussein; fleeing from Chile with her family after Pinochet’s military coup in 1973; bearing witness to the aftershocks of the Iraq war in 2003 - the task of cementing any sense of identity against this backdrop feels like sifting through rubble. We hop and skip from Chile to Iraq to London to Moscow and back again, not just in location but also in language; always itinerant, always restless.

In many respects, this is reflected in the film’s visual sensibility. There’s a lot of Kuleshovian play with juxtaposition here, old family photos interspersed with ancient Iraqi wall murals and illustrations, museum artefacts, archival footage of 1920s Baghdad, audio recordings of a young Ishtar reciting poetry. In her dorm room while studying in Moscow, we see grainy footage of a young Yasin Gutiérrez taking us through a series of objects on her table as she discusses her fondness for ritual magic; My Lost Country feels like a continuation of that ritual, a kind of visual incantation. It’s an intermingling of national and personal folklore, the objects we imbue with meaning and the magic that can result when they are combined.

There are a few more elaborate symbolist sequences, including one of Yasin Gutiérrez and another, younger figure in masks based on ancient Iraqi artefacts displayed in the British Museum, an attempt to physically inhabit a history co-opted by colonial force. The deliberate visual symbolism can get heavy-handed in places (for instance, the recurring image of spinning tops), but the film’s greatest visual strengths are in letting the juxtaposition of objects speak for itself, or in the quiet serendipity of certain long takes. One that stuck with me in particular was of Yasin Gutiérrez’ father, Iraqi theatre director Mohsen Sadoon Yasin, on the Tube to the museum. We hold on his pensive face, the hint of a grin as the houses speed by. Then, right before we cut, we enter the tunnel and a smiling Yasin Gutiérrez can be seen reflected in the Tube window. The camera is not detached; it is always underscored by that familial bond, like one hand holding another.

Because this is an intergenerational conversation, too; My Lost Country has been in the works for some 15 years, Gutiérrez tells us in the Q&A, and has at its most consistent through-line a decades-spanning bond between father and daughter - a particularly affecting sequence involves frames of young Ishtar’s childhood correspondence with her father on his return to Iraq, presented on Cocteau-esque handwritten frames. I asked about the filming process with Mohsen, which undoubtedly makes for some of the film’s most vulnerable moments. Yasin Gutiérrez responded that the film was in essence a collaboration, as much his film as hers, and that is absolutely what comes across here.

Towards the end of his life, living in London, Mohsen describes having an ancient folkloric tune stuck in his head, with doctors or psychologists having no explanation as to why. Later, as Yasin Gutiérrez and a young child plant a sapling in a deserted Iraqi neighborhood, we hear Mohsen singing that same hypnotic tune. The end of My Lost Country offers no neat resolution as to the recovery of identity from both personal and national trauma, but there is an endurance in the things we remember, if only we pass them down. The film’s aesthetic sense and the crafting of one’s sense of self are one and the same, seemingly disparate parts granted new meaning by being brought into conversation with one another; what it conjures up is, quite simply, spellbinding.