Marooned In Iraq

Released into theaters just weeks after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government signaled the opening of yet another chapter in the precarious existence of the Kurdish people, Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi's second feature couldn't have asked for better timing. Set during the brutal aftermath of the first Gulf War, when Saddam unleashed a merciless campaign of chemical attacks and systematic bombing in an effort to annihilate the Iraqi Kurds from northern Iraq, the film opens in Iranian Kurdistan, a region just north of the Iraqi border where countless Kurdish refugees have fled. Elderly Mirza (Shahab Ebrahami), a famous Kurdish singer, learns that his estranged...