Zak Moradi documentary humanises the refugee experience 

By John Harrington

If you haven’t already watched Trevor White’s documentary, ‘Home: The Story of Zak Moradi’, then make it your business to do so.

It’s a beautifully shot and affecting film that tells more than just the story of how a boy goes from being a Kurdish refugee in Ramadi, Iraq, to helping Leitrim win the Lory Meagher Cup in 2019.

By bringing Zak’s story to life and following him as he retraces the steps that brought his family from Kurdistan to Ireland it humanises the refugee experience which is something that isn’t done nearly enough.

The noun ‘refugee’ has a way of depersonalising those it describes and so it can be easy forget that every refugee is an individual person with a name and a story rather than just one of a faceless collective.

Sadly, it has become increasingly common for refugees to be painted as opportunists when the reality is that they’re victims.

The Moradis lived a relatively comfortable life in the Kurdish part of Iran but were forced to become refugees when the Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1980 which meant Zak spent the first 11 years of his life in a refugee camp in Ramadi, Iraq.

The grim reality of life as a refugee or oppressed minority is brought vividly to life in the documentary, most especially by the harrowing images of the Halabja massacre of 1988 when thousands of Kurds were murdered by a large scale Iraqi chemical attack.

When Zak and his brother Mokthar and sister Halala talk about their life before the almost unimaginable salvation of resettlement in Leitrim, they don’t just speak for themselves, but for all refugees past and present.

“We're all human beings,” Moradi told GAA.ie. “All of our blood is red. We might just look a little bit different. Everybody wants the same things in life. They want a family, they want a roof over their head. People aren't asking for much.

“There's always a root cause as to why people become refugees and we need to look at those root causes. This documentary tells you a story of how it can happen anyone.

“My parents came from a middle-class family. My father had a car when he was 16 at a time when not many people in Ireland would have had a car. You can have everything in life but you can lose it overnight.

“The Russian war in Ukraine shows that. Millions of Ukrainians became refugees and then Europe understood more why people might becomee refugees because until then it hadn't been at their own doorstep since the 1930s and 1940s.

“Sometimes younger Irish people forget about their history and the fact that so many Irish were refugees after the famine. Irish people are everywhere around the world now. There's millions of Irish in America, England, all around the world, and there's a root cause to that as well.

“This documentary shows that nobody chooses to be a refugee.”

The documentary follows Moradi as he makes his refugee’s journey in reverse, returning to Kurdistan and visiting old family friends as well as the Arbat refugee camp which clearly affected him emotionally as his own memories of being a refugee came flooding back.

“It was a great experience but it was very sad as well,” he said. “That same refugee camp we went to, my parents were actually refugees in that camp themselves in the 1980s. They spent a couple of months in tents in that camp.

“As I got older I learned why people become refugees. When you're younger, you don't know.”

For refugees the feeling of being unwanted is palpable, so it means all the more if you are eventually welcomed to a new home with open arms in the way the Moradis were when they moved to Ireland.

The GAA was Zak’s gateway into quickly assimilating into a new culture and country, and it’s been such a positive influence in his life that he wants it to do the same for others like him.

Many GAA clubs have made significant efforts to connect with migrants who have moved here and have seen their own community strengthened in return, but Moradi believes even more good can be done through sport.

“The GAA changed me as a person for the better,” he says. “All the friends I've made have been through sport, through the GAA.

“I have many friends from hurling and football all around the country and I’ve realised that 99.9% of Irish people are really genuine people and I want others like me to have that same experience and it is happening.

“Nearly every club in Dublin has people from different backgrounds playing now. Either first generation or second generation of different nationalities are playing the game which is great to see.

“That's why I said a couple of years ago that the face of the GAA is going to change in a couple of years like the soccer did. Everybody just needs to be given a chance.

“GAA clubs are very welcoming but they could always do more. It's like anything good, we can never do enough. The GAA is the number one sports organisation in the country so we can always do that little bit more extra and get more people involved.

“The GAA is such a community-based sports organisation that it really has the power to get new people involved, and that’s more important than ever now.”

More important than ever because Ireland is not immune to those who seek to divide by sowing seeds of distrust rather than preach the power of inclusivity.

Racism is on the rise and the ‘othering’ of migrants to this country is sadly more and more commonplace.

Moradi hopes that by telling his own story he will make it more difficult for bigots to dehumanise the refugee experience

“I blame Twitter for so much of the misinformation that's out there,” he says. “It's always vulnerable people who are targeted. It's terrible to see because Ireland is a great country.

“I live in Tallaght which is very multi-cultural and everyone gets on but you'll always get one or two people trying to stir things around the place on social media.

“So I hope this documentary will change the way people perceive refugees and change the way they might be thinking.

“We just want to raise a bit of awareness of the refugee crisis and help people understand a bit better what the root causes of refugees are.

“Education is the most important thing, especially for the younger generation.”

“A lot of schools have contacted me so I'm going around to show the documentary in schools all around the country. I'm hoping that by the end of next year I'll have visited a school in every county in Ireland and the aim is that the documentary is shown in 90 per cent of schools in Ireland.

“It's already going to be part of both the Junior and Senior cycle for Educate Together schools for this academic year, so that's 11,000 children which is great.

“Over 400,000 people have already seen the documentary and the aim is that we’ll get that number over one million.”

You can watch ‘Home: The Story of Zak Moradi’ on the RTE Player HERE.