The Way Of The Kurd

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.