In a strange musical autopsy of post-war Iraq, a restaurant worker’s daily routine is relentlessly monitored, her movements taking center stage to Bach’s "Goldberg Variations." In a small town on the outskirts of Babylon, she clears a table in a quiet restaurant while cameras and cranes track every gesture, using an elaborate apparatus to simulate and recreate the scene as spectacle. ​

Kamil Dossar’s video experiment strangely twists the image of universality produced by Western culture and the structures of othering embedded within it. Fahrenheit juxtaposes Bach’s Goldberg Variations with everyday life in postwar Iraq, capturing the collision of disparate cultural images. Through an elaborate camera apparatus, the film reconstructs the movements of a restaurant worker as a deliberately staged spectacle. Yet the seemingly tranquil scene is soon revealed to be a film set, reminding us that the image before us has already been meticulously constructed.
Figures transformed into reptilian forms through AI technology appear nonhuman, while their gestures remain strikingly human. Dossar pushes the gaze that turns the Other into a monster to its extreme, only to expose its logic with biting irony.

Fahrenheit is a film about my own orientalist gaze of post-war Iraq. Witnessing how my now-deceased Iraqi father studied Bach in a futile attempt to assimilate into Europe, became a window to understand the repercussions of alienation and “othering” in a world that rejects you. The “other” becomes the monster in Fahrenheit, using a custom-designed script based on Deep-Fake AI technology, to transform humans into reptiles. Bach and Iraq become two worlds in collision—a reptile playing the Goldberg Variations for a post-war Iraq populated by reptiles.

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• ProducerKamil DOSSAR
• Screenplay Kamil DOSSAR
• Cinematography Kamil DOSSAR / Mikkel ULRIKSEN
• Edit Kamil DOSSAR
• Sound Kamil DOSSAR

Kamil DOSSAR | Kamil DOSSAR | Kamil.Franko@gmail.com ​