Kilometre Zero

Hey All,

Watched Kilometre Zero for Egyptian Film this week. I can't quite say I hated it as some parts were pretty funny, but overall I found it rather dull.

The film follows this one guy, Ako during the Iraq-Iran war. Ako is Kurdish and, understandably is not one of Saddam Hussein's biggest fans. Saddam did kill thousands of Kurds in '98 in a chemical weapon attack.

Anyway the film tells of Ako's attempts to avoid being drafted into the war by Saddam. He tries, in vain, to pack up his wife and kid and high tail it out of the country. His wife, however, refuses to leave because she doesnt want to leave her bed-ridden, ailing father.

Ako does end up going to war, but while on the army base he tries really hard to get discharged. At one point he resolves to "sacrifice his own leg" - what follows is a pretty comical scene in which, while fighting in the trenches, Ako stops shooting, lies down, and holds his leg up high demanding the enemy to shoot his leg off. Ako is a bit indecisive tho, as he keeps switching legs; he's not sure which one would be the better one to lose.

Ako doesn't lose his leg, unfortunately, but he does leave the base when he's charged with the task of delivering the body of a fallen soldier back to the soldier's family. Poor Ako then has to drive for the next three days, with an Arab man (Arabs and Kurds at the time must have had difficulty getting along, or at least that's what the film implied) through the dessert with a rotting corpse resting in a crude casket tied to the top of his car. The smell alone, I think would have killed me.

While driving along, Ako and the Arab man get into a disagreement that leaves Ako (and the corpse) alone in the desert. Ako then, somehow manages to get himself, his wife, his son, and his father-in-law (bed and all) to the Turkish border and then from there into much safer conditions.

While the film had a good storyline, the way the film was shot and edited didn't quite win me over. There was a slight problem with editing - this may have just been the crappy quality of the streaming though, but at the end, right before the credits Ako and his wife were standing at a window shouting and jumping for joy at the fall of Saddam and then, suddenly they werent there anymore.