Iraqi Renaissance (2) Iraqi Cinema storms Cannes Film Festival

Agence France Presse is reporting that “Iraq - past and present - loomed over the second day of the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday with two films, one Iraqi and one from Japan. "Kilometer Zero," by Kurdish-Iraqi filmmaker Hiner Saleem, is the first Iraqi film to be selected for the official Cannes competition since the festival's inception in 1946, generating a buzz of its own. At the press screening late Wednesday ahead of its official showing Thursday, journalists appreciated the dark humor in its tale about a Kurdish-Iraqi conscripted into Saddam Hussein's army to fight against Iran in 1988, but were more intent on putting it into the context of the ongoing controversy about the Iraq war and its aftermath. The film itself invited comparison with the U.S.-led war by bracketing the story with contemporary scenes of the main characters reacting to the conflict in Paris, first with surprise then with glee over the fall of Baghdad. "This director doesn't swim with the tide of European thought, and I thought that was refreshing," said Harlan Jacobson of USA Today magazine. But Lebanese journalist Carla Toubia of Abu Dhabi TV said she found the film "humiliating" because of its nationalistic Kurdish slant against the Arab majority in Iraq: "Everybody knows what happened in Iraq and what Saddam Hussein did, but this film seemed to show hatred toward people who were suffering and couldn't do anything about it," she said. (AJ)