Film Review by Jalal Jonroy, New York 2001

A picturesque mountain village.  May be in Tibet? Un-spoilt by crass globalization: No MacDonald’s; No Soft Drinks; No Neon Lights; No MTV; No TV antennas; No CNN Headline news; No lifeless supermarkets. Just people living together close in adjoining homes  with open terraces.

Caring neighbors who breed and take care of their innocent children.  A village nestled in the mountains independent and self-sufficient with own family doctor on a motor cycle. A village surrounded by fertile fields of wheat, vines and strawberries. Grazing cows, sheep and goats. Women still making fresh cream, butter and cheese the old way- by swinging and shaking milk in a goat skin. And baking fresh bread over Saj or in Tandur. Tomatoes sun dried on roofs. (No, this is not Italy!)  Honesty and warmth and hospitality are second nature to these villagers.

When a City Engineer arrives in this mountain village, his camera left in his car is kept for him by the tea-house owner woman in case schoolchildren’s curiosity break it!  As he passes villagers’ homes, everyone greets him warmly, inviting him saying “come in, this ‘s your home.” People old and young know and recite philosophical and romantic poetry in their daily conversations. Music is played in the background. Old women mostly wear black. Hey, this could be Zorba’s Greek Islands.

Young women wear the colors of butterflies.  Women and men work openly and quietly and industriously. That’s how they’ve built and maintain this isolation from modern world for centuries. A pregnant woman of about 35 says to the Engineer she already has had 9 children!

In the West, especially in France and Western Europe, a quaint old self-sufficient village like that would be protected and cherished as part of their heritage. In the Third World, the educated rich minority and the nouveau riche copying the ugly side of capitalization despise such villages and their traditions as old and backwards. The modern engineers and bureaucrats do their best to replace these old villages with modern concrete buildings and paved roads and new sterile housing complexes. 

The village of “The Wind Will Carry Us”- the latest film by Abbas Kiarostami (the famed Iranian director, many times winner at Cannes Film Fest)- is actually Kurdish in Hawraman mountains of Iranian Kurdistan.

In Iraq Saddam destroyed 5000 such villages to starve Kurdish fight for cultural autonomy. Turkey has done the same- already 4000 villages and still counting.... If you see this magical village in this film, perhaps you will be horrified at the crimes of cultural and ecological genocide committed by Saddam in Iraq, and by supposedly democratic Turkey in its “South East”, i.e. Kurdistan. 

The Oxford Dictionary defines culture as “customs, achievements, traditions, music, art, food, literature... of a particular people.”  See for yourself if the people of this Kurdish village and more than 9000 Kurdish villages like this would have been worth saving. Culture isn’t just the current popular trendy spiritual religion- be it Dalai Lama’s Buddhism or the fantastic whirling Sufi dervishes or Jewish Kabala (promoted by ex-rabbi salesmen in white tunic dressed ex rabbis in L.A.) or Hari Krishnas in orange  robes.  Cultures of nations like Kurds, Persians, Kashmirians, Tibetans often predate Judeo-Christian-Islam religions or Buddha or Hindu. 

Kurds who, like Persians, were mostly Zoroastrians, got drowned in the expansive ‘politically-correct’ flood of ‘La Ilaha Illallah; Allah u Akbar’ Islam in 7^th century. But Kurds, especially in their camel-proof mountains, kept most of their culture, customs and traditions. At worst, they adapted them to Islam or vice versa!

Preferring one “exquisite” spiritual culture over another is a kind of racism in disguise.  Until we study a people deeply as Martin Scorsese, Michael Wilson et al have done for Tibet, and now Kiarostami for a Kurdish Hawraman village, we don’t really know what we have.  Who’re we to judge? For 2000 years, weren’t Jews supposed to be only evil money dealers, causing and leading to the horrendous Holocaust? 

Anyway, for anyone interested in Kurdish or ancient cultures, if you slow down, you will enjoy this film. But sadly, unlike Kiraostami’s other remarkable films (His ‘Through the Olive Trees’ is not to be missed and his ‘Close Up’ is selected as one of 150 Masterpieces of World Cinema), his new film’s storyline is thin and its Engineer miscast (bit of a Jerk!). Some confuse its noble & worthy subject matter with the film’s quality. This film is virtually plotless, with no believable character development. (The endless repetitions of ‘cell phone on the hill’ joke becomes tiresome- we got it after the third repetition!). Kiarostami’s fans will no doubt find philosophy in all this ramblings…especially in the throwing of the bone in the river at the end: Ah! “Life Goes On.” Again!

But “The Wind…” is quite charming to see if you liked the other spiritual film Kunden about Dalai Lama by Martin Scorsese- that film, too, is poor in plot and character. Although “The Wind…” is bare bones compared with the extravagantly made, colorful Kunden, the message is the same: Let’s appreciate and keep old villages and cultures. To hell with Communist China, Russian Supremacist, Turkish Military, Saddam, Islamist governments and ugly Globalization! 

Jalal  Jonroy, New York.