--
After six months of being declined a visa to
the United States, Kurdish film director Bahman Ghobadi has finally
gained entry - to promote his new movie, "Marooned in Iraq,"
which records Saddam Hussein's atrocities against the Iraqi Kurds
through a Kurdish musician's eyes. It opens in New York on Friday.
When the Iranian-born Ghobadi began making the film two years ago, he
had no idea that it would prove to be such a tragically timely piece.
But though the film is an indictment of the Saddam Hussein regime,
the 33-year-old director makes it clear that he has equal loathing
for United States foreign policy.
"I am one of the biggest enemies of what the American government
has done in the Middle East," Ghobadi says. "I am very much
against what's going on [in Iraq]."
Still, the Malaysian government banned the film, labeling it a piece
of pro-U.S. propaganda that could jeopardize relations - before the
war - between Malaysia and Iraq.
Ghobadi won a Camera d'Or at the 2000 Cannes International Film
Festival for his first feature, "A Time for Drunken Horses,"
which chronicled the lives of a Kurdish family so poor that they fed
liquor to their horses in order to get them to work.
As a Kurd growing up in western Iran, Ghobadi witnessed the Iranian
revolution and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, during which the
Kurds - who live in an unrecognized state called Kurdistan,
straddling the border between Iran and Iraq - suffered greatly.
"My uncle, aunt and cousin were killed, and my sister was
crippled as a result of the war," says Ghobadi. "These
memories of my childhood are in front of me."
In 1991, the Saddam Hussein regime attacked Kurdistan with bombs and
chemical weapons to suppress a Kurdish revolt.
Infuriated, Ghobadi wrote "Marooned in Iraq," the story of
a Kurdish musician who searches Iraqi Kurdistan for his estranged
wife - only to discover that she has been deformed by Saddam
Hussein's chemical weapons.
"The Kurdish people have always known Hussein to be a terrible
menace, a war criminal, and one of the worst perpetrators of war
crimes throughout history," says Ghobadi. "But no one was
willing to stop him."
Despite the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, Ghobadi is insistent that
war is never the answer, that countries like the U.S. and Britain
should help other countries institute and enforce civil law and
boundary disputes. "If they had spent time doing that, rather
than propagating the war, the situation in the Middle East would be
very different," Ghobadi says.
Though "Marooned in Iraq" is fictional, the director was
inspired by the things he saw, heard and experienced. When he finally
started filming in February of 2002, he chose to shoot in the snowy,
inhospitable terrain of both Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan.
"I was determined to shoot the film in harsh conditions, because
it helped me tell my story," says Ghobadi.
The film's cast is composed of Kurds - almost all of whom,
unsurprisingly, had never acted before. "A lot of the actors in
the movie had never seen a movie in their lives," says Ghobadi.
Many of his cast members, in fact, had actually lost family members
to the Saddam Hussein regime - and these were the kinds of people he
was looking for. "I just wanted to find someone whose father or
brother had died in the war," he says. "I went to [one
village] and it was filled with people whose loved ones had been killed."
When it came time to shoot the movie's final scene - in which Kurdish
women discover a mass grave in the snow-clad mountains - Ghobadi gave
no direction at all.
"When I said 'Cut,' people kept crying," he says. "The
next day, when I went back to the set, people were still crying."
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