Long live HINER SALEEM
Twelve months after Michael Moore scooped
Director Hiner Saleem did not win the Golden Palm this year. But his film "Kilometre Zero" created a good deal of buzz at the competition, which closed on Saturday, not least because of its final scene.
"We're free! We're free!" two Iraqi Kurdish exiles shout exultantly as they hear the news of Saddam Hussein's overthrow on
That joyous reaction to the invasion of
"My film is not the opposite of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' because I don't judge George Bush or the
As the primary victims of Mr. Hussein's brutality, subjected to poison gas and mass executions, "we Kurds would have been happy if the French or the Swedes had liberated us," he adds. "But it was the Americans who came. For us, the result is positive."
In fact, the controversial ending was tacked on to the original screenplay to give the film more currency, for fear that foreign audiences might find the central story line too distant. Most of the film - about a young Kurdish man press-ganged into
The movie follows Ako from his village in the Kurdish mountains to the front line near the southern Iraqi city of
"The Kurdish army gave me 200 pounds of TNT," Saleem recalls. "All the explosions are real, all the bullets were real. That meant I had to do all of those scenes in one take."
The resulting film met with mixed reviews at
Even the US-funded Arab satellite TV channel, Al Hurra, which might have been expected to celebrate the first-ever Iraqi entry at
"When it comes to Kurds, their nationalism comes to the surface," Saleem sighs. Though his does too, of course: He doesn't regard his film as an Iraqi one, nor himself as an Iraqi. Both, he insists, are Kurdish and only Kurdish.
Partitioned between
Kilometre Zero's prominence at
"The antiwar people accuse Kilometre Zero of being pro-Bush, and I'm afraid the other side will just say 'Look, we told you so.' We are meant to think either like the Europeans or like the Americans," Saleem complains. "Well, I want to think like a Kurd.
[1]Christian Science Monitor
I wished more Kurds talked like this! This article is great (only there were some lil mistakes)
Biji Hiner Saleem