Istanbul Film Festival Highlights

Article posted Mon May 26 11:24:35 2003

The U.S. State Department should buy 1,001 copies of the Iranian-Kurdish movie Marooned in Iraq, dub it into every Middle Eastern and North African language, and then distribute it widely. Although the main theme focuses on a Kurdish Iranian family of musicians, the main setting and sub-plot is Saddam Hussein’s 1988 repression of the Kurds.The director’s strange melding of comic antics and war zone horrors makes Marooned in Iraq vastly entertaining while delivering a damning indictment of Saddam’s ruthless regime. The film, by award-winning Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, was a favorite at the 2003 Istanbul International Film Festival in late April, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq was underway.

Istanbul generally, and festival organizers specifically, were exceedingly hospitable to the relatively scant American presence. No anti-American posters, graffiti, or protest demonstrations marred the event. Just about the only semi-official acknowledgement that the U.S. was at war in neighboring Iraq at the time was the front page of an alternative, weekly entertainment tabloid. Its cartoon cover for the last week of April showed a woman blowing a roll-out party noisemaker onto the nose of a combat-clad soldier who wore a sort-of U.S. flag on his gear.

Hardly stridently belligerent, the cartoon cover’s message seemed to be: “Take that, Uncle Sam! We’re having our film festival anyway.” With movie theater venues along “new” Istanbul’s trendy Istiklal Caddesi (Avenue) which radiates from Taksim Square, the trolley-tracked street was mostly a pedestrian mall packed with Turks at all hours. Women in black burqa garb strolled undisturbed past Istiklal shop windows displaying risque Frederick’s of Hollywood style lingerie. Calls to prayer from nearby mosques competed with rap music blaring from music shops. Istanbul, it seemed, and perhaps Turkey in general, is not overwrought with anxiety by what others see as irreconcilable conflicts between Western modernism and traditional Islamic values.

Marooned in Iraq was definitely a good stage-setter for the 2003 festival. Although the film has tragedy and despair aplenty, especially in the snow-bound, bandit-plagued refugee camps and mass graves, this curious film has been aptly described as a sort of “Three Stooges in a War Zone” caper. That’s because the story is told around the antics of two brothers, musical sons of a legendary Kurdish musician who is trying to respond to a desperate plea from his ex-wife who has survived Saddam’s bombs in an Iran-Iraq border region. Saddam is cursed regularly throughout the film, and we are repeatedly shown the brutality of the dictator’s repression of the Kurdish minority, including his use of chemical weapons (the effects of which are crucial to the story’s denouement). Until the end of this “road trip into a war zone” movie, we don’t know why the aging Kurdish musician has been urgently summoned to the snowy and dangerous borderland, but we learn that it has more to do with love than honor.

With English subtitles, exuberant action, lively Kurdish folk music sung by the main characters and a straight-forward storyline, the movie is so easy to follow that probably no viewer will be confused. Even the mostly comic sub-plots are easy to follow, which is not always the case with foreign films.

Marooned in Iraq won prizes at film festivals in Chicago, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Cannes last year. Director Ghobadi’s first feature film in 2000, A Time for Drunken Horses, was given the top award for Best First Film at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival the following year. The roar of Saddam’s jet fighters and bombers punctuate the soundtrack of Marooned in Iraq as the film credits roll at the end.

Ghobadi’s new work did not win the Istanbul Film Festival’s top Golden Tulip trophy —the Argentine film Tan de Repente did, although some festivalgoers felt Brazil’s Madame Satão should have—but it has continued to draw international interest. Marooned in Iraq was favorably reviewed in the May 19, 2003, issue of The Nation magazine. Reviewer Stuart Klawans proclaimed “International cinema has an irresistible new pair of reprobates: middle-aged brothers who can do no right in their lives and no wrong before the camera.” Tan de Repente (Suddenly) is the first full length feature by Argentine director Diego Lerman. It is also a road trip movie that mixes humor and drama, unexpected, chance encounters and contradictions.

In a separate competition for best Turkish movie, the Istanbul Film Festival jurors selected the slow-paced Uzak (Distant) by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who described it as substantially autobiographical. Among the more than a dozen films I saw at the festival, it was the only one that actually put me to sleep. And I think I heard others snoring before I succumbed to the film’s sedative effects.

Distant is something of a sequel to an earlier Ceylan movie, Clouds of May, in a rural Turkish setting. This time the characters are trying to make it in cosmopolitan Istanbul. As might be expected from a “rural boy comes to the big city” storyline, Distant’s themes are loneliness, deception, and betrayal. Ceylan provided this insight to his new film: “The idea of adapting for the silver screen a life that is seemingly impassionate, colorless and monotonous has always excited me more.” If monotony was the director’s goal, he succeeded—and even won a prize for his effort.

Jeff Radford is a journalist with more than 40 years experience in local, regional, national and international news reporting and editing.  A former Associated Press World Service editor and writer, Radford's reports have been published in leading newspapers throughout the world. He is also the Radford Reviews Middle East Correspondent.