Bekas
Karzan Kadir
The story: In Iraqi Kurdistan in 1990, orphan brothers Zana (Zamand Taha), six, and Dana (Sarwar Fazil), 10, dream of going to America to meet Superman. Their journey begins on the back of a donkey named Michael Jackson and their adventure is, by turns, sweet, funny and harrowing. Bekas means “parentless” in Kurdish.

Under Saddam Hussein’s despotic rule, the Iraqi Kurdish were targeted in a genocidal campaign and then cruelly repressed when they rose up against the regime after the Gulf War ended in 1991.
Writer-director Karzan Kader fled from Kurdistan that same year with his family to Sweden to start a new life. It must have been an intense experience for the six-year-old Kader, yet the film that emerges from such a grim history is one that is charming and endearing.
The story is simple as it focuses on a pair of brothers and their dream of going to America. They plan to look up Superman there and get him to right all manner of wrongs from dealing with Saddam to bringing their parents back from the dead.
Zana is at an impressionable young age where he believes in Superman’s powers and much of what his older brother tells him. Dana is older and knows enough about the world to want to protect his brother from it.
The performances from Zamand Taha and Sarwar Fazil are wonderfully unaffected and they are utterly believable as brothers, playing and laughing one minute and fighting and arguing the next.
Zamand, in particular, makes the spunky Zana come alive, whether he is excitedly yelling for his brother, sulking when he gets scolded or lighting up the screen with his smile. He manages to win you over even though Zana is stuck at one volume level – piercingly loud.
The story starts off almost fable-like. Yes, the boys are homeless and too poor to even afford clean water for washing.
Yet they live in a world where they get by on the kindness of other people and they seem to be cushioned from the harshest realities by an aura of innocence.
As they journey forth, however, the real world begins to intrude, although Kader handles that with a light touch.
The boys encounter border crossings manned by armed soldiers and have to figure out how to slip past them. Not quite as thrilling as Argo’s (2012) hostage-rescue perhaps, but the scenes are still tense and dramatic. Towards the end, the film gets a little repetitive, perhaps a consequence of lengthening a short film into a feature-length drama.
Bekas (2010) won a silver medal at the Student Academy Awards in 2011.
Still, there is much to like here for the glimpse it offers into a foreign land and culture and the appealing turns by the two non-professional child actors.
Hopefully, the film will not be orphaned in theatres here.
(ST)