Marooned in Iraq

Probably the only Kurdish film I have ever seen, and a real winner. Some cultures are so foreign, so alien, they might as well be from Mars for all I know about them. These people have nothing, they have been torn by war forever … and yet it is almost a comedy. Sure, there are horrors, and a sad ending, but it still manages to be upbeat. Plot: an old musician enlists his sons to cross the Turkish border into Iraq to search for a woman who left him twenty years ago. And we discover, to my astonishment … that these men are treated like rock stars everywhere they go. Everybody knows them, and pleads with them to play their music … which might as well be Martian music to me, but soul is where you find it, and these guys obviously have it. Highly recommended.