Film: Changing Perceptions of Real Evil

A young teen, shabbily dressed, crosses a barbed wire fence on a scenic, snow-covered mountaintop with his disabled brother tied to his back and a decrepit mule in tow. Thus ends A Time for Drunken Horses, a film by the young Kurdish writer/director Bahman Ghobadi. The film finds power in its simplistic presentation of the harsh realities of Kurdish refugee life on the Iraq-Iran border. Intended to help us begin to form more complete perceptions of foreign cultures, this film is the first in a new series recently underway here at Duke.

The series, aptly titled "Reel Evil," has lined up six films: three from George W.'s "Axis of Evil" countries and three others from nations designated as rogue states by the Bush administration. The remaining films, representing North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Iran (Libya's was shown yesterday), will screen each Wednesday night for the four weeks following break. Co-curator of the series, Negar Mottahedeh, a new addition to Duke's Literature Program, hopes that these films will help viewers better understand the nations with whom our government has developed an adversarial relationship. Each movie has been chosen as a fictional representative of its national film industry, offering the opportunity to see things through each of their respective cinematic lenses.

"We may find some flavor of a national narrative culture and some grain of the 'real' culled from the quotidian lives of peoples and cultures we've been encouraged to see as one evil body against whom we are to direct our national aggression," Mottahedeh explained.

Drunken Horses, chosen to represent Iraq, kicked off the Reel Evil series to a respectably large audience in Griffith Film Theater last Wednesday. But while its reception on campus has been relatively tame, the festival has been receiving attention from world news media sources ranging from the BBC to MSNBC to the Rush Limbaugh radio show.

What these outsiders want to talk about is something we have the opportunity to do right here: See these films, think about their implications and discuss what they say about the cultures and the people they represent. Our government and mass media have provided us with an opinion about these "rogue states" and within the Reel Evil film series, we have been given an outlet to create our own.

"One could say that we are measuring the narrative of evil against the narratives of the comedies, love stories, war epics and everyday life dramas that these films represent," Mottahedeh said. Through Reel Evil, then, we may hope to grasp a fuller understanding of our government's definition of "real evil."

-Jon Schnaars