A Silent Traveller

Essentially a propaganda film, a call to arms, even, this shows life in a Kurdish village under the thumb of Saddam Hussein's police, represented here by a local mullah's son who describes himself as a 'government jackal'. With Greece persuasively standing in for Kurdistan, it's not devoid of ethnographic interest, but cinematically it's basic fare. Sympathies for the peshmerga guerillas are never in doubt, but with didacticism like, 'Christians and Jews are our brothers', passing for dinner table conversation, the film must content itself with preaching to the converted.