Zaman: The Man from the Reeds / Zaman, lhomme des roseaux (Iraq, 2003) dir. Amer Alwan

An aging peasant (Sami Kaftan) travels to Baghdad, Iraq, to find medicine for his ailing wife. A quiet, lyrical picture in the Iranian realist tradition, it finds drama not in falling bombs, but in the aging Zaman’s (Sami Kaftan) life-or-death quest to find the medicine that could save his beloved wife (Shadha Salim.) Life in Mesopotamia dates back to 3000 B.C., and people still live in floating reed houses in the Tigris and Euphrates swampland. From this ancient world of reeds and waterfowl (destroyed in large part by Saddam Hussein’s regime), Zaman journeys to urban modernity. Yet even his timeless world is shaken by international events, from an orphan’s traumatic memories of his parents killed in the last Gulf War, to the sound of invisible military jets flying overhead, to the undiagnosed illnesses that have begun to strike the population.