Latif al-Ani, the beloved ‘father of Iraqi photography’, captured his country in its heyday from the 1950s to 1970s. When Saddam Hussein took power, al-Ani put down his camera. His photographs form a unique archive showing a cosmopolitan Iraq, before the devastation of war, that many Westerners and even Iraqi people themselves have never seen.

In Iraq’s Invisible Beauty, 86-year-old al-Ani travels across his devastated homeland, accompanied by Belgian-Kurdish filmmaker Sahim Omar Kalifa, in search of the people and places he once knew and captured on film. Al-Ani died in 2021, soon after the completion of this film, which forms a moving tribute to the great photographer and the country he lost.