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Reviews
Vodka Lemon (2003)
Not recommended for most people
This is an older, lesser known film from director Hiner Saleem.
The film is nothing but collection of wasted opportunities. Armenia, which had Armenians, Kurds, Azeris, Russians and, to a lesser extent, people from all over the USSR. You have so much going on - Communism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Nagorno-Karabakh War, the new governments and new states and you had Kurds in the middle of all this in one way or another.
But this film doesn't focus on all these things. It barely uses them in the background.
The location and the time period are tools to tell a story. Instead, they're used just as a backdrop.
A widower goes to his wife's grave to talk to his dead wife. There's a lot of snow. A lot of poverty. He sells things several times, usually furniture, at flea markets or at flea market prices to random people he meets on his way. His son is not doing better abroad and asks his father for help. The widower meets a woman at the graveyard.
As others have said - there is nothing particularly Kurdish about this film. There is nothing particularly particular about this film. It could've been a film set in Latvia, Kazakhstan, Belarus or any of the former Soviet republics. It could've been set in Serbia, Romania or Poland. The same character can have the same story without any difference.
It's not due to the universality of the story, but due to a lack of story. A man talking to his dead wife and selling his furniture in a flea market is not a unique experience.
But one has to wonder - why make this film? Why is this film, produced in 2003, set soon after the fall of the Soviet Union? If the director wanted snow, he could've gone to any part of Kurdistan. A Time for Drunken Horses has similar themes - a child lugging things through the snow out of poverty. This film swaps child for old man, but the story is still essentially lugging stuff to sell through the snow out of poverty. In Drunken Horses we have an orphan, in Vodka Lemon we have a widower. Both feature a marriage.
This film has nothing unique to say about the Soviet Kurds, the Yazidis, Kurds in general or anything at all.
The film is wrongly labelled here "comedy" but there is nothing comedic about it. It is closer to tragedy than a comedy, but it's too slow to be tragic. It's a slow film where nothing happens. There is no plot in this film, so don't expect there to be an ending.
The acting is average, not exceptional, but I can't blame the actors for the script. The cinematography is average. Yes, the country is beautiful but you don't get points for filming pretty subjects. The camera work is average. There is no score that I recall. The use of music is sparse.
This is a film that is made to be liked by foreign viewers. This is not something Kurds enjoy watching. In this case, both would be in agreement. Very, very few people would enjoy something like this. I acknowledge that some people like incredibly slow films. It currently has 6.8/10 on IMDb, but it gets its relatively high vote from its niche audience. Most people would watch this film, would be turned off by the trailer or would not be able to finish the film.
A Time for Drunken Horses is a better version of this film, by another director. My Sweet Pepper Land is a better effort from this director.
Zamani barayé masti asbha (2000)
The quintessential Kurdish film, with all the positives and negatives that that entails
This is a Kurdish film. That does not just mean that it is a film in the Kurdish language or one set in Kurdistan, it also means that it is Kurdish by genre.
Children or orphans, child labor, war or the result of a war, missing or sick persons, remote area, difficult terrain, smuggling, poverty... If you think you've seen this before, you probably have, in another film.
This is not the fault of this film, as it is one of the earliest ones, but when everyone (including this director) started reusing these themes, this film didn't age well. There are just too many films about the same topics, ones that don't go too deep into the issues beyond presenting them to the audience.
This film is a snapshot in the life of some children who try to save their sick sibling.
The children have to become adults much earlier than they should, needing to quit school, be responsible, get married or work at an age when they should be children. This film is shot in a cinéma verité style, almost like a Handicam documentary and you really feel like you are there.
Some have commented on the acting, feeling that it is unprofessional, while others said that it was very convincing because the actors weren't really acting. I'm siding with the latter, even though I think both sides are describing the same thing. Some people expect to see acting and are unconvinced by people being or playing themselves.
I have several problems with this film. For one, as a story, it lacks an ending. It's not ambiguous, it's just abrupt. The film doesn't end, it just stops.
Secondly, this film also doesn't go deeper into the issues. It presents them as a list of problems Kurds have to endure, but it just goes from one item to the next, offering no cause, commentary or solution.
For example, the director, Ghobadi, could've shown how circle is perpetuated. Children have to choose between working to survive or going to school. This leaves the population uneducated, able only to do menial work, live in poverty and struggle to take care of their own children, who themselves have to choose between working to help their parents and siblings or go to school.
The director could've shown another angle, how war, poverty and lack of health care have changed the shape of the family in some parts of Kurdistan where the new nuclear family is the siblings alone taking care of each other.
He could've shown us how the suffering of these children is the fault of their parents who decided to have these children at a terrible time, after the destructive Iran-Iraq war and during the first Gulf War. These children were born as Kurds at a time when Iran and Iraq hated each other, with Kurds in the middle and everyone under embargo.
Ghobadi could've shown us the cause, shown us how this is perpetuated or shown us a solution or a glimmer of hope.
You begin to ask questions. Why did the father not marry again to have a stepmother for these children? After decades of war and genocide, the population of Kurdistan is unbalanced, with so many widows and unmarried women. Marriage in such difficult times is not about love, weddings or childbearing, but about economics and survival. This man could not find one widow to help raise his children? That is hard to believe.
In real life, broken systems bring broken and imperfect solutions. The broken solution to child poverty is child labor. The solution to lack of jobs is the grey/black markets. The solution to losing a wife is to find one's children a stepmother. The director has deliberately cut out that option to give us a story that is sadder. Between realism and sadness, the director opted for the latter. The solution to childlessness is adoption. But that is cut out too.
These are failings in this film. The director chose to give us something that would sell better because it's sadder rather than something more realistic.
Finally, even as I give this film 7/10, I wonder what the point of this film is. As a movie, it's not that entertaining. As a documentary-like film, it's not that realistic, aiming clearly to deliver the saddest story possible, almost following a checklist (orphan siblings of a sick child have to engage in child labor and sell their sister as a child bride to pay for their brother's life-saving surgery. Is that not contrived?). It's not a documentary, so it does not propose solutions, give us causes or a deeper look.
So what does this film do? It is, in a way, misery snuff, meant to elicit a sad response from the viewer. It does that job well with incredible focus, but at the cost of overall film quality.
There is little focus on Kurdish culture, while Kurdish music, perhaps the most important thing in Kurdish society, plays almost no part. This is due to the filming style - adding a cinematic score would've clashed with the look the director was aiming for.
I called this film the quintessential Kurdish film because more and more films follow this template - produced in 2000, Kurdish cinema has still not advanced one inch. We get to choose between tragedies and fairy tales. This one is a tragedy, Bekas a fairy tale.
My criticism is harsh for a film I give 7, because it has to be. Giving this film 10/10 does no one any favor.
Positives: acting, cinematography, realism (somewhat), casting, location Negatives: lack of story, ending, depth, message; lack of music/score.
My Sweet Pepper Land (2013)
An interesting genre-mashup film, but quite simplistic
One of the biggest problems in Kurdish cinema is the lack of new ideas. Stories about war, poverty, loss of home, displacement, orphanhood and search for missing persons are used over and over, making Kurdish films not an industry of all kinds of films, but into a genre of similarly themed war films.
Repetitive themes and tropes also plague western films and it would take some really imaginative thinking (such as a robot-powered theme park set in the Old West, that is Westworld) to create something new.
This film is a genre mashup. It does not revolutionize the genre of the western, but gives it a new breath of life, by setting it in modern times (today) and in the Kurdlands rather than the Old West.
There are many parallels between the Old West and the fringes of Iraqi Kurdistan and this film plays on that. Places with low populations, far from the city, corrupt local authority, the difficulty of the central government in applying law and order, the difficulty or the terrain, low levels of education, lots of guns and the potential for conflict.
We have two stories here, Baran, a sheriff who wants to apply law and order to the region and Govend, a teacher who wants to teach and bring education to the children of the area.
The film does a good job with the story, even if it is predictable and straightforward.
My issue with this film is that it is fluffy, cute and nice, when it could've been much better. This film had the potential of being a 10/10 film, but chose to polish the edge off and make it a simple flick.
For example, Baran and Govend are good, while Aziz Aga is bad. It's straightforward, black and white, no gray, no nuances, no subtlety. The Kurdish state is good and local tribal chiefs are bad. It's too simplistic.
I would've loved to see a complex and complicated relationship between Baran and Govend. I'd love to see a film where Aziz Aga, despite being a corrupt absolute ruler turns out to be right. Or it turns out to be that he is a peshmerga war hero who became corrupt. Or that he was also the sheriff once, giving Baran a glimpse of his own future. I want to see how the smuggling market is all gray area, with the central government using its power not to shut down all smuggling, but just its competition. Show the hypocrisy of the Iraqi Kurdish government in working with the Turkish army against separatist Kurds in Turkey. Perhaps Aziz Aga is a Pan- Kurdist who sees the big picture whereas the Iraqi Kurdish government is happy with having liberated a slice of Kurdistan.
Show how parents have to choose between educating their teens or making them work on farms. Show how parents disagree with the syllabus of the central government's school.
You don't have to show all these things, but you should show at least something deeper. This film is Disney-like in its simplicity.
Great films are about subjectivity, about hard choices and difficult compromises, about change, things that make you think. This doesn't do any of these things.
These are things that this film could've made us think about:
Is the central government's rule absolute? This central government appoints Baran from Erbil to be the sheriff of this small town. Does this small town not get a say in this decision? There is an interesting strong central state versus regional powers discussion to be had, but this film ignores it.
Is Iraqi Kurdistan the final stop in the Kurdish liberation movement? Should Erbil fight Kurdish separatist movements in Iran/Syria/Turkey that use its territory for smuggling or as a safe haven?
What if a local corrupt chieftain involved in drug trafficking spends his money on building schools, orphanages, hospitals, etc.? Should the central government's sheriff shut down his operation? Why? If the central government's contribution to the area is just a single sheriff and some firearms, aren't the locals better off with the corrupt chieftain?
Kurdish films need to be more like life and less like fairy tales.
This is a good film, nonetheless, but there's no compelling reason for non-Kurds or non-Kurdophiles to watch it, when there are many better and deeper films out there.