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This title is currently out of print!
From acclaimed director Bahman Ghobadi comes the first film made in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
On the Iraqi-Turkish border, enterprising 13-year-old "Satellite" (Soren Ebrahim) is the de facto leader of a Kurdish village, thanks to his ability to install satellite dishes and translate news of the pending U.S. invasion. Organizing fellow orphans into landmine-collection teams so that they can eke out a living, he is all business...until the arrival of a clairvoyant boy and his quiet, beautiful sister.
A review:
"The first impressive thing about Bahman Ghobadi's movie is that it got made at all. Not many directors, perhaps, would choose to film in the Kurdish encampments of northern Iraq, where life has been a mix of the ramshackle, the uncertain, and the downright lethal. The story is set in the days before the arrival of American forces in 2003-a cause of much rumor and hope. Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) is a boy of thirteen, but he has grown old before his time, and everybody in the village, adults as well as children, relies on his initiative. This is a world of losses: adults who have lost authority, and children who have lost parents and limbs. We watch Satellite as, true to his name, he brings television (and therefore news of war) to a clamoring community, and, far worse, we watch the teen-age Agrin (Avaz Latif) try, with awful persistence, to put a stop to her own suffering and to that of her illegitimate child. All this should be grim beyond bearing, yet the film treads carefully, and even lightly, through its tribulations. Never has childhood seemed more weirdly resilient, or less cute."
—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
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