This is one of the most astounding movies I have ever seen! I knew nothing at all about the movie before I went to see it, other than that it was Kurdish and "very good". So at first I thought it was a documentary, so well acted was it by the young, unprofessional cast. No doubt this impression was enforced by much hand-held camera footage: the scenes of Kurdish smugglers fighting on the Iran/Iraq border just HAD to be real!
Visually it is stunning in an horrific, bleak & beautiful sort of way. I was reminded in parts of certain aspects of the vision of Werner Herzog, in regard to the long treks through vistas of unending Snow & Rock. I literally started to shiver sitting there in the cinema!
The plight of the brave Kurdish children is heart-rending and at the same time heartening; their great strength and inherent nobility gob-smacked this old Western decadent! It is still hard to sift the reality of their experiences from the fiction of the story as portrayed in this movie. None of the cast are professional actors, I gather, by the fact that they all used their real names.
And there aint no trite and "Disney" conclusion to this provoking visit to an inverted Shangri-La: this movie bites!
Do yourself a favour: see it!
Visually it is stunning in an horrific, bleak & beautiful sort of way. I was reminded in parts of certain aspects of the vision of Werner Herzog, in regard to the long treks through vistas of unending Snow & Rock. I literally started to shiver sitting there in the cinema!
The plight of the brave Kurdish children is heart-rending and at the same time heartening; their great strength and inherent nobility gob-smacked this old Western decadent! It is still hard to sift the reality of their experiences from the fiction of the story as portrayed in this movie. None of the cast are professional actors, I gather, by the fact that they all used their real names.
And there aint no trite and "Disney" conclusion to this provoking visit to an inverted Shangri-La: this movie bites!
Do yourself a favour: see it!