Kilometre Zero

Iraq, 1988: unable to leave the country while his bed-riddden father-in-law remains alive, Kurd Ako (Kirik) is forced to join Saddam’s army, and finds himself escorting a soldier’s corpse through the desert to his family, in a truck driven by a Kurd-hating Arab (Ekrem). While the sincerity of feeling behind this serio-comic road movie is never in question, the script is clumsy and predictable, the acting one-note and the direction fairly rudimentary. One particularly feels for Bilgin who, as Ako’s wife, is simply required to be either shrewishly hot-tempered or compliantly sexy. That thin characterisation is symptomatic of the movie’s generally undernourished feel.