Iraqi film at Cannes for first time

Iraqi director Hiner Saleem, centre, Turkish actors Belcim Bigin, right, and Nazim Kirik, left, pose during a photo call for their film Kilometre Zero

Kilometre Zero is the first Iraqi film competing at the Cannes Film Festival. Director Hiner Saleem, an Iraqi Kurd who fled the country as a teenager, returned to his homeland to shoot the movie after Saddam's fall.

Set in 1980s Kurdistan during Iraq's war with Iran, Kilometre Zero is a road trip movie about a Kurd and an Arab asked to return the body of a fallen soldier to his family. It touches on some of the hardships of the Kurdish people, who were oppressed, often brutally, under Saddam's regime.

Since only a handful of films have ever been made in Iraq, there were many challenges to shooting there, the director said. "One day the problem was, how to find a camera?" he said. "In the whole country, I didn't find one."

Eventually, because Saleem couldn't find any technicians either, he brought a crew from France for filming in Iraq's Kurdish north. Then came the problem of finding a statue of Saddam, key to creating the right atmosphere in a movie about 1980s Iraq.

The statue is a strong image, especially because photos of jubilant Iraqis toppling a giant statue of Saddam have become one of the defining symbols of Baghdad's fall to the US troops in 2003.

The crew spent two weeks searching for a sculptor willing to make a statue of the ousted dictator. One finally accepted and went to work in a walled garden, but then a security agent glimpsed the top of the towering statue over the wall. The statue was confiscated, and the sculptor was thrown in jail.

One of the main characters in the movie is a young Kurd forced into the war against his will. Saleem said he based some aspects of the character on the story of his brother, who dashed out to the bakery in his pajamas one day and was rounded up to fight.

The director fled Iraq in the early 1980s and now lives in France. Going back to Iraqi Kurdistan filled him with mixed emotions. "After the fall of Saddam Hussein I cried with joy to see my people so happy," he said.

The movie has many scenes of war and destruction, although it is also sprinkled with black humour. Although the film ends on an upbeat note, one of the characters utters a line that Saleem says was one of his grandfather's favourite sayings: "Our past is sad, our present is tragic, so thank goodness we have no future."