What they discover is a people brutalized by the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, who is engaged in 1991-1992's relentless campaign of bombing both Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan's destitute villages as retribution for trying, with the first President Bush's encouragement, to rise up against him. As Mirza and his sons make their way from town to town, what they discover is a trail of blood and misery - most of the settlements are abandoned, with the men having been summarily killed by Saddam (frequently with chemical weapons) and the women forced to flee into the snowbound mountain ranges. Yet unlike his oppressively bleak debut, Marooned in Iraq is not bereft of levity. From their encounter with a matchmaker trying to appease a dissatisfied customer to Barat's blossoming love for a grieving woman and Audeh's constant complaining about his abandoned seven wives and 13 daughters (and his attempts to find yet another wife who will finally bear him a son), Ghobadi portrays the Kurds as full of resilient courage and liveliness, qualities that have helped sustain these browbeaten minorities during Saddam's reign of terror.
While the threesome face numerous obstacles on their journey to Iraqi Kurdistan and Hanareh - including thieves who steal their motorcycle, clothes, and musical instruments - it is their indefatigable optimism that eventually leads each man to acquire the very thing they've been seeking. Ghobadi once again uses a cast of phenomenal Kurdish citizens with no prior acting experience, and his directorial maturation is reflected not only by Marooned in Iraq's balanced temperament, but also by its more traditional visual approach - the handheld cinematography that gave A Time for Drunken Horses its documentary realism has been replaced by graceful compositions that transfix our gaze on the characters' weathered, expressive countenances. Still, one occasionally wishes that the film were an even more drastic departure (both in terms of narrative and style) from Ghobadi's prior effort. The director revisits a number of striking images from his previous film, including a group of desperate Kurdish smugglers fleeing Iraqi aggression, as well as that film's final image of a young boy carrying his sickly brother across the two countries' border in search of relief. One hopes that by the time this humanistic director finishes his next film, such haunting imagery will finally be a thing of the past.
Aka Gomgashtei dar Aragh.
