Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for every mention of mythical characters
Take a Drink: for big dreams
Take a Drink: for street orphan songs
Take a Drink: for concerning news in the background
Do a Shot: for real-life gunfire or explosions
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
The Epic of Gilgamesh is held to be one of, if not the heroic epics, one that has survived up to four millennia, and one that continues to inspire to this day.
Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream follows Chum-Chum, one Gilgamesh-obsessed Iraqi orphan boy and his street-dwelling orphan friends as they dream big and fight to survive in a society still fighting the fights that stranded them.
A Toast
Director Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji creates a detailed depiction of life on the fringes, as dozens of children separated from their parents by conflict or death do their best to work together to survive a society where to most they’re an afterthought. One woman who’s lost her own family runs a mobile school for all these street children, who are generally more interested in the free meal than the free education despite her stern insistence.
Moody (Hussein Raad Zuwayr) has charisma for days and a chip on his shoulder, but he looks out for our young protagonist Chum-Chum (Youssef Husham Al-Thahabi) a natural screen presence himself, and his sister (Lojin Star Naimal), even if it means mixing with the dangerous elements that run the area from the shadows.
Al-Daradji, who found a new home in Holland himself as Moody would like to here, draws interesting parallels between the Hanna Barbera-looking Gilgamesh cartoon he’s obsessed with and the Chum-Chum’s story. He seeks to dive to the bottom of the Tigris river to be reunited with his dead parents, just as Gilgamesh traveled to the underworld to retrieve a dear friend. It is not at all hard to understand why the world of fantasy is far more interesting to this young man than anything the real world has to offer.
Beer Two
While the shooting style and acting are all plenty naturalistic, many details of the story feel as fantastical as the myths that Chum-Chum yearns for. How even does this mobile school bus come to be? What is up with the laxest hospital/pharmacy in existence? The passport thing was real?
Don’t ask too many questions- just roll with it.
Beer Three
Things take a marked turn for the melodramatic in the second half of the film. I’m not arguing that one should expect happy endings in a nigh hopeless place- far from it- but it’s a bit unrelenting.
Verdict
Irkalla – Gilgamesh’s Dream is a story of orphaned Iraqi children surviving own their own and trying to make sense of the world that has abandoned them.
