For me definitely the most breath taking film of the festival. Imagine The Road being a little bit less dangerous but way more real and hopeless. A few weeks after Saddam’s fall in Iraq. A grandmother and her grandson, a 12 years old boy, both Kurds, on a thousand kilometers long journey to find their son/dad in a Saddam’s prison. When the story turns rapidly into a landless and never-ending search for at least a sign of the sons/dads identity, when the only wish remained is to know for sure that he is dead but getting no certainty, the journey becomes literally deserted. The grandmother becomes inconsolably sad, the son is perplexed and exposed to unlimited misery all over. The grandmother dies on a back of a car hallucinating while he faces the road in front of him with tired and forever changed eyes. Thanks to amazing actors and to the character of a willful boy this incredibly sad story has its own entertaining potential and surprisingly, you will have a laugh in some scenes. The dialogues are temperate but greatly written and every single character in the film is not only “real” but important and highly interesting. Some friends said that it’s too much calculative and emotionally hijacking. I don’t think so at all.
85%
Why all Spanish movies want to look like another Almodovar? This one is much closer to a telenovela than to a festival film and despite some very fine moments and interesting plot, the film itself feels hollow and constructed. Schizophrenia, sexual abuse in a family, wrong and ill people. Maybe it was all too much, maybe it was just because the same day I saw Son of Babylon, but I felt distant. And I didn’t bought it. It is not a bad film in comparison to an overall production in Europe, it’s just nothing you would need to think twice and then talk about.
45%
More to go: Mr. Nobody, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, The Gift and A Serious Man
The Last Old Mod***MDP74 v. 3.0 
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