Film Depicts Saddam Hussein as Monster

CANNES, FRANCE – Twelve months after Michael Moore scooped Cannes' top award with "Fahrenheit 9/11," - a scathing indictment of the Bush adminstration's handling of the war in Iraq - a very different movie director screened a very different view of the war at the world's premier cinematic gathering.

Director Hiner Saleem did not win the Golden Palm this year. But his film "Kilometre Zero" created a good deal of buzz at the competition...

"We're free! We're free!" two Iraqi Kurdish exiles shout exultantly as they hear the news of Saddam Hussein's overthrow on April 9, 2003. "We're free! We're free!"
That joyous reaction to the invasion of Iraq is not likely to go down well with the European audiences who idolized Mr. Moore. But Mr. Saleem, an Iraqi Kurd, is equally worried about being adopted as a standard-bearer by the war's supporters.
"My film is not the opposite of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' because I don't judge George Bush or the United States," Saleem says. " I judge Saddam Hussein and I simply say he was a monster."

In fact, the controversial ending was tacked on to the original screenplay to give the film more currency, for fear that foreign audiences might find the central story line too distant. Most of the film - about a young Kurdish man press-ganged into Iraq's war with Iran in 1988 - explores the suffering and humiliation that the Kurds experienced at the government's hands.

The movie follows Ako from his village in the Kurdish mountains to the front line near the southern Iraqi city of Basra, and then back again when he is assigned to escort home the corpse of a fallen comrade.

Read more about it at the Christian Science Monitor [thanks to BenS for the link]