By the time Saddam Hussein was executed in December 2006, Iraq had experienced the “most intense” year of sectarian violence since the US-led invasion three years earlier.

It’s why the Iraqi filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi chose that year in which to set her fictional film about Baghdad under the US occupation. There’s no main character but instead an ensemble of people, residents of one neighbourhood whose lives are intertwined in one way or another, and punctuated by violence and curfews.

“I wanted to tell a collective story from the start,” says Pachachi, 76, who wrote and directed Our River… Our Sky, which won the best ensemble performance at the 2022 British independent film awards and is out now at UK cinemas.

“I was inspired by Persian miniatures, when you have, for example, the painting of a market and in every bit of the picture you have a story going on – over here there’s a mother and her child, over there you have two merchants arguing about something,” she says. “In the end, that picture is a collective portrait of a time and place and that was something that really appealed to me.”

Pachachi says she didn’t want a central character. “I wanted everybody to have the same weight – they were all in this together.”

In the film, no one’s life has been left intact by the war. Many people are leaving Baghdad. Sara, a writer and single mother, is mulling whether to leave for the sake of her young daughter, Reema. Sara has lost her love for language, everything she writes now feels like a lie.

Kamal, a taxi driver, says: “Forgetting is a blessing from God.” Dijla takes care of a brother left disabled by a bomb during the 1991 Gulf war. Mustafa has been wounded after a kidnapping. Haidar, a teenager who has lost his mother in unexplained circumstances, is being groomed to join a gang. Mona is expecting a baby. And an unnamed cleaner sweeps a street after an explosion while the rubble is still smouldering.

Our River… Our Sky is Pachachi’s first fiction film. She has had an extensive career in documentary film-making and training film-makers, often focusing on the Arab world and women in exile.

One of the first documentaries she worked on as producer and editor was Voices from Gaza, during the first intifada (1989) for Channel 4. Iranian Journey in 2000 followed a female bus driver on a 24-hour trip across the country.

She says fiction enabled her to “go further beneath the surface of a character”.

Pachachi, who is based in London, was born in the US to an Iraqi diplomat father. She grew up between Iraq, the US and the UK. She studied at the London Film School under the award-winning British writer and director Mike Leigh.

Pachachi returned to Iraq after the 2003 invasion for the first time in 35 years. What she found shocked her. The conflict had been “like a wrecking ball”, she says.

Everything had fallen apart. The country had been torn away by violence and “some of the most severe sanctions in history”.

She and another London-Iraqi director, Kasim Abid, set up a film centre in Baghdad to offer free training to young Iraqi film-makers and journalists so they could tell their own stories.

“These wars get waged and the shooting stops and everybody thinks that it’s all over. But actually it’s not all over. Because people have to deal with the aftermath of all of this,” she says. “You see the aftermath of a bomb, you see the woman crying and beating her breast but you don’t know who she is, you don’t know the son who’s died – who was he? You don’t know anything about these people.”

She remembers watching hours of media coverage of bombs and buildings being blown up during the 1991 Gulf war, never seeing “one ordinary Iraqi person on the screen talking”. On film, the Iraqi war has mostly been told from a US perspective.

“It’s easier for people to accept wars if they can think of the people who are on the receiving end of war as something different from them,” she says.

“If they become entangled with the character they feel for the character, and they start to think: ‘What would I do if I were there, in that situation?’” she says.

There are no tanks or soldiers in Our River… Our Sky. The war is the background with the spotlight on ordinary lives. “I don’t focus on the violence or the blood on the streets, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what people do with what happens.”

One key scene, based on actual events, depicts a group of people, including Sara, on a bus stuck in traffic. There are gunshots in the street and someone running between cars is killed. Someone on the bus cracks a joke.

“At that time in 2006, a time of sectarian violence, Iraq became like a joke factory,” Pachachi says. “It’s a very Baghdadi thing. I also believe that people find a way of resisting the damage all around them. They sing a song, they tell a joke, they flirt. They want to have a baby. And all of that to me is resistance, resistance to the damage they have to live through.”

In Arabic, the film is entitled Kulshi Makoo. “It’s a particularly Iraqi expression,” says Pachachi. “I can say to a friend, ‘Are you OK, you’re looking a bit ill,’ and they’ll say, ‘no, no, no, kulshi makoo,’ or there’s nothing wrong with me. But in fact there is something wrong.”

• Our River… Our Sky is in cinemas now