Baghdad On/Off
Saad Salman
2002 - 86 min - Mini DV - Couleur - France

After 30 years of exile in France, an Iraqi director decides to go back to his country clandestinely and attempts to get to Baghdad where his mother is dying. A few miles past the border, he meets an old woman, a refugee who gives him five eggs for his sick mother... This is the beginning of a road movie through Iraqi Kurdistan, mixed with poetry, humour and dramas. His guide (a character who embodies the Iraqi mentality) tries to make him cross the invisible frontier between the North of the country, protected by a UNO resolution and the rest of the territory controlled by the Iraqi army. The attempts to join Baghdad succeed one another.
Each time, something unpredictable stops him at the last minute from getting there, as if invisible forces united against him. Will he finally arrive in Baghdad? Will his mother receive the fragile gift from the old woman ?