By Khaled Yacoub Oweis DAMASCUS, April 4 (Reuters) - Iraqi film director Basim Kahar says the homeland he remembers in two films set for release this month is no longer recognisable to his generation of secular artists. "Khatoun (the Ladies)" tells the stories of 62 Iraqi actresses who left Iraq in phases, most of them after the U.S. invasion four years ago. "Ambassador in a Cafe" is about Abu Haloub, a leftist Iraqi exile who has for years been going to Rawda cafe in Damascus, and sits at the same table every day. Kahar says this breed of artists and intellectuals, once highly respected, is becoming extinct in an Arab World which is turning more Islamic. "Baghdad has become wrapped in a turban and wearing a beard," Kahar told Reuters. "Abu Haloub and the 62 actresses who represented Iraqi femininity and joy in theatre, cinema and television do not belong to the 'new Iraq'." The U.S. invasion, he said, had ushered in a dominant political class allied to clerics who are wiping out a tradition of art and secular thought that survived even the stifling ideology of the now-deposed Baath Party under Saddam Hussein. "Abu Haloub represents Baghdad's dying character -- a culture of dress, song, painting, cafes, theatre, museums, behaviour, dealing with others and even food," Kahar said. "The Baghdadi character survived lack of freedom for decades but is now extinct. It has been driven out of its home and its city. Religion has taken over politics, culture, morality and law. We have gone back centuries." When Kahar returned to Baghdad after the invasion for the first time since leaving in 1991 -- he has lived in seven countries since -- he could not identify with his home city. Kahar says few women now dare walk the streets of Baghdad without wearing a veil. Its use was already becoming common under Saddam's rule and as United Nations sanctions contributed to economic collapse. Alcohol was easy to come by before the invasion, but since then many of the capital's alcohol shops have been bombed by militants. University professors have become a preferred target for assassination. Baghdad is also losing diversity. Minorities, such as Christians, left in droves. Several statues of poets and other secular figures were destroyed, he says. Violence became a common way to deal with activities deemed un-Islamic by rampaging militias and groups tied to al Qaeda. ANGER Kahar studied direction in Baghdad and is originally a theatre specialist, but recently started making documentary films about Iraq to reach a wider audience. "Ambassador in a Cafe" will make its debut on the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera in April, said Kahar, who also aims to show the two films at international festivals in Europe this year. The 43-year-old director spends his time between Sydney and Damascus, which along with Beirut and to a lesser extent Amman have become a hub for Iraqi writers and artists in exile. His work so far has included a production of Jean Genet's play "The Maids" at the Sydney Art Theatre. "Arabia" -- a play about the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad -- ran in Damascus. "I look with anger at my homeland. The focused sectarian violence is annihilating it. I am beginning to doubt whether my memories of Iraq were not just dreams," Kahar said. Perhaps nostalgically, he remembers the Baghdad he grew up in as a capital where art and a secular culture sometimes flourished -- although a large number of artists like him left during the U.N. embargo era in the 1990s. Despite an increase in the influence of religion during the last decade of Saddam's rule, singers and musicians still assembled every week at the Baghdad museum on the shores of the Tigris to play the Takht, a quartet of Arabic instruments which has been Iraq's unique contribution to Arab music. Stability and secure streets meant more people went to the theatre than now, although nothing critical of Saddam or the Baathist political system was tolerated. For Kahar, one of the tragic consequences of the post- invasion upheaval is the degradation of women and the erosion of their rights. They were oppressed under Saddam -- many left rather than declare allegiance to him -- but less than now. In the documentary, Iraqi actresses speak about the fear they felt of living in Baghdad after the invasion, being known as actresses. Before, an actress could manage if she stayed out of politics. "There is no freedom, no democracy if women in practice are deprived of their right, if they are threatened with murder if they do not wear the veil in country that produced the first woman minister in the Arab east," Kahar said. "Her name was Dr Naziha al-Dulaimi," he said. "She wore a skirt and appeared in public on par with men. That was in 1959."
