The eight-year-old Mohamed: Kurdistan’s filmic future?
I’ve just spent three weeks in a village of 600 people in northern Iraq. Goptapa, which looks north-eastwards towards Turkey and Iran, is on a hilltop lined with goat paths. When there aren’t dust storms you can look down onto a vast oxbow lake valley whose river snakes to the Tigris and Mesopotamia. The villagers grow pomegranates and keep geese, goats and cows. About 100 of them were gassed in Saddam’s Anfal operation in the late 1980s. There’s a new school, and a little mosque. For three nights, I made a cinema there out of sparkly fabric, the first time there had been one in the area. I gave the kids in the village little high-definition video cameras to make movies. They queued up to use them. One of the eight-year-old boys made a beautiful four-minute film. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. Here’s what I want to say:
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