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CANNES, France (AP) -- For an Iraqi filmmaker on
location in his homeland, one of the biggest hassles
was getting hold of a key prop: a statue of Saddam
Hussein.
"Kilometre Zero" is the first Iraqi film competing
at the Cannes Film Festival. Director Hiner Saleem,
an Iraqi Kurd who fled the country as a teenager,
returned to his homeland to shoot the movie after
Saddam's fall.
Set in 1980s Kurdistan during Iraq's war with Iran,
"Kilometre Zero" is a road trip movie about a Kurd
and an Arab asked to return the body of a fallen
soldier to his family. It touches on some of the
hardships of the Kurdish people, who were oppressed,
often brutally, under Saddam's regime.
Since only a handful of films have ever been made in
Iraq, there were many challenges to shooting there,
the director said Thursday.
"One day the problem was, how to find a camera?" he
said. "In the whole country, I didn't find one."
Eventually, because Saleem couldn't find any
technicians either, he brought a crew from France
for filming in Iraq's Kurdish north. Then came the
problem of finding a statue of Saddam, key to
creating the right atmosphere in a movie about 1980s
Iraq.
The statue is a strong image, especially because
photos of jubilant Iraqis toppling a giant statue of
Saddam have become one of the defining symbols of
Baghdad's fall to U.S. troops in 2003.
The crew spent two weeks searching for a sculptor
willing to make a statue of the ousted dictator. One
finally accepted and went to work in a walled
garden, but then a security agent glimpsed the top
of the towering statue over the wall.
The statue was confiscated, and the sculptor was
thrown in jail. Saleem said he had some explaining
to do before the sculptor was released.
One of the main characters in the movie is a young
Kurd forced into the war against his will. Saleem
said he based some aspects of the character on the
story of his brother, who dashed out to the bakery
in his pajamas one day and was rounded up to fight.
The director fled Iraq in the early 1980s and now
lives in France. Going back to Iraqi Kurdistan
filled him with mixed emotions.
"After the fall of Saddam Hussein I cried with joy
to see my people so happy," he said. "And also I was
distressed to see the naivete of my people," who
didn't always realize the difficulties ahead.
The movie has many scenes of war and destruction,
though it is also sprinkled with black humor. Though
the film ends on an upbeat note, one of the
characters utters a line that Saleem says was one of
his grandfather's favorite sayings: "Our past is
sad, our present is tragic, so thank goodness we
have no future."
AP
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