SXSW Review: The First Movie

My favorite thing about a film fest like SXSW is the possibility it allows to step outside your normal comfort levels and discover something you really love that you never expected, or at least something incredibly noteworthy and interesting.  The international aspect opens a path not just to films but to nations and cultures that get little or no media coverage in the US.  My first film selection for 2011, aptly titled The First Movie, is a documentary that ventures into the most remote section of Iraqi Kurdistan, a region decimated by war. 

The First Movie is a sort of dreamy documentary exploration into the filmmaker's psyche. Mark Cousins narrates his journey to Goptapa in northern Iraq, a farming village that in 1988 fell victim to chemical warfare attacks by Saddam Hussein's forces, instantly killing one in seven people. Cousins describes growing up in northern Ireland and how the beauty of the country, unmarked by the violence, seems more real than the war that tore through it. 

He finds this same beauty in places like Goptapa, where he spends the month of Ramadan getting to know the children there. At first, he films them himself, but in a bit of an experiment, he sets up a makeshift outdoor theater and screens various classics for the children, including The Red Balloon and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and then gives cameras to the children, hoping to see the world through their eyes. Unfortunately, it appears most of the footage they shot was of them playing soccer, play-fighting, or otherwise horsing around.

The majority of the film is obviously footage shot by Cousins' team. Cousins narrates in a sing-song voice, entirely calm, that is soothing like a father trying to lull his child into sleep. That, along with a tendency to over-dramaticize the narration of some of the kids' footage may tend to annoy, particularly the only segment he gives an actual name in the film, "The Mud Boy."

In the "Mud Boy" clip, one of the children plays in an irrigation ditch while the young filmmaker, introduced to us as Mohammed, narrates off-camera, a script he's written to describe how the boy plays in the mud, because there is nothing else in the village to play with. This has a little less impact as we hear Mohammed instructing his subject to play in the mud while narrating and also given the number of shots we've seen by this point of children playing soccer, or with toy guns or various doves and pigeons, which they handle in an uncomfortably rough way.

Cousins is so focused on comparing the children to the little filmmaker inside himself, he fails to really focus on the more interesting footage that Mohammed captures: the men inside the mosque, breaking bread at the end of their fast, of grandmothers telling how they lost their families in the chemical attacks, opening up and telling stories they might not relate to an outsider with a camera. This was the most important part of the film, when one woman describes fleeing with her children, wiping their eyes with water from the river only to have it blind them.

In his time spent playing with the children, Cousins has stumbled on a larger, deeper story when the message it appears he's trying to impart is that these are beautiful children, like those anywhere else on Earth, and in them is hope. The First Movie is a beautiful work, but lacking a clear focus, and a few slightly self-indulgent experimental shots.