"Bekas"

Director Karzan Kader’s involvement in this project is more than professional. It is personal, even intimate. To start with, Bekas evokes Karzan and his family’s own flight from their native Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, faced with the menacing advance of Saddam Hussein’s army. The filmmaker was then eight years old and his exodus took him to Sweden, where he has lived ever since. Kader’s feature debut is also based on the short of the same name with which he graduated from the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts in 2010, and for which he won the Silver Medal at the 38th Student Academy Awards (the Oscars for film school productions).

Bekas tells the story of young Zana (7 years old) and Dana (10), two orphan brothers who decide to abandon their miserable life in a Kurdish village to travel to America, a "city" they think is two or three days away. The two little boys take this firm decision after briefly seeingSuperman in the village cinema, and do the impossible to make their dream come true. Thanks to their hard work as shoe shiners, they manage to save up enough money to buy a donkey that they call Michael Jackson and with which they decide to set off to accomplish this feat.

 

Behind this endearing, moving, and highly amusing odyssey also lies an intimate portrait of the Kurdish conflict in Iraq, one that has been ongoing for almost a century. Kader explains his film’s intention of social reclamation: "Kurdistan has been in war for so long that it has become the normal state there. I want this story to be a voice of the Kurdish people to the rest of the world".

 

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Kurdish-born, Swedish-based helmer Karzan Kader expands the idea behind his award-winning short "Bekas" into a homonymous feature, but padding out the story ends up detracting from the charm.

Kurdish-born, Swedish-based helmer Karzan Kader expands the idea behind his award-winning short “Bekas” into a homonymous feature, but padding out the story ends up detracting from the charm. The biggest drawback lies in how Kader directs his kiddie stars, especially the younger one, whose gratingly strident voice has zero modulation. If it weren’t for the screechiness, “Bekas” would be a handsome if derivative tot-centric pic about two Kurdish orphans wanting to go to America to meet Superman; as is, the annoyance level wipes away much of the appeal, though the recent Swedish release has seen decent returns.

 

Kader appears to have imbibed from the “Cinema Paradiso” cup, investing rather too much in the sentimentality behind a honeyed evocation of the projector’s throw as seen through a child’s eyes. It’s 1990 in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Dana (Sarwal Fazil) and his younger brother, Zana (Zamand Taha), are orphans (“bekas” in Kurdish). They’ve just seen “Superman” at the cinema — or rather, part of it, since they’re caught watching from the roof and given a wallop by the manager. Inspired by the superhero and with no home of their own, they decide to go to America, which Dana says is just a few days’ ride away.

Their timing is lousy, since Saddam Hussein’s anti-Kurdish policies have turned the region into a hostile military zone. By chance they run into Osman (Abdulrahman Mohamad), who was once a freedom fighter along with the kids’ late father. He promises to help them cross the border, but the road is dangerous, and fellow smuggler Jamal (Shirwan Muhamad) is less than sympathetic.

 

Kader looks to generate a Huck Finn vibe, crafting a road trip fraught with literal and psychic danger, in which values such as brotherhood and home play a major role. The impact would have been stronger, however, had the helmer been less concerned with making a slick, syrupy epic for Western auds and spent more time tempering his cadences. Right from the opening, when the kids are playing soccer, the over-vigorous camerawork tries too hard for an almost “Mission: Impossible” feel, and subsequent sequences, with sweeping crane shots arriving exactly when expected, reduce the pic’s beating heart to an overscrubbed simulacrum.

An additional flaw is the way practically everyone these tots meet whacks them at the drop of a hat. This is especially noticeable when they finally cross into Arab-speaking territory (the Syrian border, presumably) and the people Zana begs for help all beat him rather than try to understand what he needs. His ear-splitting squawks certainly don’t make him lovable, but surely everyone isn’t like Huck Finn’s Pap.

Dialogue is delivered too cleanly, with each boy waiting for the other to finish a sentence before speaking — the opposite of how children talk. Johan Holmqvist’s grandiose, invariably golden-hued lensing turns the story into a greeting-card version of the orphans’ plight; the schmaltzy music comes as no surprise.