'Marooned in Iraq' celebrates resilience of long-suffering Kurds

By Kevin Thomas
Los Angeles Times

•	'Marooned in Iraq' Not rated In Kurdish, with English subtitles 97 minutes

The Kurds have endured endless oppression and, at the hands of Saddam, genocide. "Marooned" is set along the border between Iran and Iraq, as was Ghobadi's previous feature, "A Time for Drunken Horses." It is also rich in images of natural beauty and the warmth and passion of Kurdish music.

On the Iranian side of the border, Mirza (Shahab Ebrahimi), a celebrated singer, learns that his ex-wife Hanareh, also a singer, has been entertaining in refugee camps along the border and needs his help.

Knowing that his sons, Barat (Faegh Mohammadi) and Audeh (Allah-Morad Rashtian), would not accompany him otherwise, he tells them that he and Hanareh were never really divorced but that she simply ran off with his friend Seyed. Mirza is therefore able to argue that it is a point of honor that they try to locate her.

Considering its time and place, "Marooned in Iraq" has a surprising degree of earthy humor until its climactic sequences. Ghobadi shows his people as having endured so much for so long that they have developed a hearty survivor's sense of humor in regard to the absurd extremes of human suffering and injustice. At every turn, Mirza and his sons are vulnerable to thieves and border police.

All three have explosive tempers, which means their rants over the workings of outrageous fortune can make them seem comical figures. At the same time, they're always open to the good that comes their way. Barat, who has never married, may have found a wife at last in an attractive woman with a beautiful voice.

As they make their way from one camp to another, the film takes on an increasingly dark tone as the men cross over the border into Iraq, where it seems as if the country's entire Kurdish population has joined in a long trek, trying to escape from the constant strafing of Saddam's planes and his chemical warfare. Even though the film's tone grows ever more elegiac, it stubbornly remains a celebration of the Kurdish capacity to endure.