Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
May 19-25, 2005

The way of the Kurd

Notwithstanding his ambivalent response, Samir Farid, in Cannes,
believes the Kurdish offering stands to reap one of the festival’s
awards

This year the 58th Cannes film festival (11-21 May) started on an
unusually low key with Lemming, the third feature by French filmmaker
Dominik Moll. On the second day Woody Allen’s last film — according
to some critics, no more than a third-rate update of The Talented Mr
Ripley, in which the drama is played out among the moneyed beau monde
of modern London — nonetheless commanded a full house. It was on the
second day, too, that Hiner Saleem’s Kilometre Zero, also known as
Degree Zero — a joint France-Kurdistan TV production shot in Iraqi
Kurdistan — was screened. This is the first Iraqi feature to deal
with post- Saddam Iraq, though an earlier film about Kurds, Bahman
Ghobadi’s ICA production, Turtles Can Fly, came out of Iran last year.

Saleem is a gifted filmmaker whose Vodka Lemon won the San Marco
prize in the 2003 Venice film festival. Set in a snowbound Kurdish
Armenian village where the villagers are selling themselves to
survive, Vodka Lemon — a sensitive, poignant film dealing with the
ordeal of Kurds in the formerly Soviet republic of Armenia — seem to
echo Chekhov’s curt portrayals of the human condition. It tells of
a Kurdish émigré’s efforts to transform the snows of Armenia into a
desert like Kurdistan. As a jury member I was personally vindicated
by its winning the San Marco prize, faring better than the work of
both Lars Von Trier and Sophie Coppola.

Born in 1964, Saleem was implicated in a failed attempt on the life
of a security officer and fled Iraq at the start of the Iraq-Iran
war (1980-1988); he was only 16 at the time. He crossed the border
to Syria, whence he proceeded to Italy where he scratched a living
as an illustrator-caricaturist catering mainly for tourists. He
moved again, to Paris, where he was granted political asylum before
returning to Italy to earn a degree in international relations from
Venice University.

Having produced Long Live the Bride…And the Liberation of Kurdistan
(1997), Beyond Dreams (1999) and Vodka Lemon (2003), Kilometre Zero
is Saleem’s fourth feature. A comprehensive artist, he writes his
own scripts; in 2005 he also published an autobiography entitled My
Father’s Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan. It would not be unreasonable
to expect Kilometre Zero to win one of the festival prizes — to be
announced next Saturday — perhaps the special jury award, which in
2003 went to Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention.

Perhaps because I’m not a political writer I’ve always sensed
a contradiction in the way Arabs, myself included, embraced the
Palestinian question while failing to recognise the plight of the
Kurds as a legitimate struggle. The 1922 Laussane Treaty divided
Kurdistan into Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian provinces, with
populations of 20, nine, six and two million, respectively. Since then
the Kurdish tragedy has occasioned many a disaster, one of which, the
Halabja incident in which 5,000 people were gassed, I had the honour
of exposing as part of an international commission investigating war
crimes against the Kurdish people in Iraq.

It was thus with great enthusiasm that I welcomed Saleem’s take on
the plight of Kurds in Iraq. It also indicated that there is room
for many more productions of the same high calibre as, for example,
Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002). Though on a smaller scale than Ararat,
Saleem’s film is an accurate reflection of the historic moment at which
Iraq as a whole reaches degree zero. A road movie, it courses through
the dusty pathways of provincial, out-of-the-way Iraq, through which
the body of a dead soldier is being transported back to his family.

The film opens in 2003, the start of the American-led international
coalition’s war on Iraq, with Ako (Nazmi Kirik) and Salma (Belcim
Bigin), a Kurdish couple living in Paris, expressing a fundamental
ambivalence: “We know what America’s designs are. Still, we want to
get rid of Saddam Hussein.” By the end of the film, on 9 April 2003 —
the day Baghdad fell — Ako and Salma are gazing out of their window
at the Eiffel Tower, screaming, “We are free, we are free…”

Only in the course of a flashback does their plight as Kurds become
apparent, with Ako recalling his time in Kurdistan weeks before the
Halabja massacre — the long journey during which he carries the
body of a friend killed in the war from Basra, in the far south of
the country, to a Kurdish village on the northern tip, shared with
a nameless Arab driver (Ayam Ekram) — a kind of cinematic litany
of the horrors committed against Kurds during the Iran- Iraq war.
Rough-edged and dynamic, both the journey and other episodes are a
little crudely executed.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the film is why Saleem failed
to make the nameless Arab driver a rounded character — a conscious
decision, it would seem — though one wonders whether the answer to
Arab racism is Kurdish racism. The film is not devoid, however, of
poignancy in the way it depicts Kurdish-Arab relations: the moment at
which Ako and the driver discuss the conflict, for example, each from
his vantage point; they are hurling hostile questions at each other
and when the questions remain unanswered, in the end, the viewer does
not feel that either party is in the wrong.

Iraqi army officers are seen routinely abusing and sometimes
murdering young Kurds on the pretext of preparing them to fight the
invasion. Ako, who is eager to flee Iraq before he is conscripted into
the army, is prevented from doing so by his father- in-law’s poor
health. Ako is reluctant to fight, even when a Kurdish compatriot
attempts to mobilise him against Saddam’s army. On the battlefield
a fellow soldier tells him, “We are fighting Kurdish traitors and
Iranian Zaradustians — under the banner of the leader of all Arabs,
not only Iraq, and in whom everybody believes, down to fish in the
Tigris.” To which he remains silent, but as the air raid intensifies
in the night he is seen screaming, “Goddamn the war, Goddamn Iraq,”
moving one of his legs hysterically as he cries out, “Here it is. Take
it if it’s what you want.”

Ako’s homeward journey begins with a cortège of coffin-bearing
vehicles: corpses draped in the Iraqi flag, about which Ako feels
very ambivalent. “A flag that assumes new form every now and again,”
he says, referring to the mutations it has undergone, including the
Allahu Akbar — in Saddam’s own hand — added by the dictator. One
sobering gag that runs through the duration of the film is a towering
statue of Saddam on a flatbed truck encountered twice on the road from
Basra to Kurdistan; it seems to shadow the protagonist on his journey.

When he finally reaches the village, Ako finds no one to deliver the
body to; no longer are any of the soldier’s family members there. In
one particularly poignant scene Ako ends up alone with the corpse;
the driver, declaring he has already played his part — Ako can do
with the body what he will now — abandons him; and Ako rips the flag
off the casket bearing the soldier’s remains. Initially covering the
head with the flag to protect it against the burning sun, he goes
on feeling uneasy, however, and throws it away altogether, only to
fetch it back and place it on the coffin with the death certificate
on top of it, held in place by a small stone. Finally making up his
mind, he pauses, gives his compatriot a military salute and finally,
leaving him to himself, departs.

>>From this point onwards Ako becomes a deserter, and in order to
avoid being caught and killed he transports his family to a deserted
Kurdish village on the Turkish border. Despite its emptiness the
village is bombed, and Ako’s father-in-law is killed in the process
— a somewhat surreal scene reminiscent of Vodka Lemon, in which the
camera shifts from the man on his death bed to the bed itself sloping
over the hills of Kurdistan.

Many very strong points count in favour of this film: Robert Alazraki’s
excellent cinematography; Nikos Kipourgous’s music and Freddy Loth’s
sound engineering, making up a remarkable soundtrack in which loudly
amplified if incomprehensible speeches by Saddam contrast with
clearly intoned patriotic songs in his glory, mixing Iraqi military
with Kurdish folk music to boot. Saleem’s use of an amateur cast is
one of the weaknesses of the film, since few directors are capable of
turning such a potential shortcoming into an asset. The two exceptions
are Nazmi Kirik, a professional theatre actor, and Ayam Ekram, a well-
known Kurdistan TV performer in his first film role, who carried the
two lead roles convincingly. Aside from its weaknesses, however, this
91- minute feature is likely to garner the admiration of the jury,
perhaps for political rather than purely artistic reasons.

–Boundary_(ID_95q5gzbOTbO9ZE2vSZlcKQ)–