Encounters on the Tigris follows a journey taken by artist and filmmaker Sherko Abbas in 2022, along the ancient Tigris river, in search of previously undocumented oral traditions and the ecological knowledge they hold. His journey begins in the Kurdish Zakho district of northern Iraq and ends in Al Faw, where the river meets the Persian Gulf in the south.
Featuring interviews with folklorists, Quranic scholars, musicians and local communities, Abbas captures songs and stories about water that have been transmitted orally from one generation to the next for centuries. At a time when climate change is beginning to have devastating impacts across the region, the film highlights the precarity of communities who depend on the river and the environmental instability resulting from Iraq’s recent history, revealing ancient cultural traditions increasingly at odds with new ecological realities.
