AllMovie

During the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Kurdish community of Northern Iraq was wracked with violence and nearly 200,000 Iraqi Kurds lost their lives. However, while much of Iraq has been violently unstable since American forces invaded in 2003, Iraqi Kurdistan has become relatively peaceful, with something resembling normal life going on amidst the nation's chaos. Photojournalist Ed Kashi is a photojournalist who spent seven weeks in Iraq in 2005, and his documentary Iraqi Kurdistan is a portfolio of images he captured there, edited to the rhythms of Iraqi music. While Iraqi Kurdistan offers some vivid glimpses of the human cost of the war, the film is dominated by scenes of ordinary people and their lives -- kids playing, women working in factories, people enjoying a carnival, soldiers training in the desert, men enjoying a feast, a little girl having a birthday party with her friends, and more. Iraqi Kurdistan was screened in competition at the 2006 Silverdocs Film Festival.