2016 Sundance Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
A Flag Without a Country (2016)
Bahman Ghobadi’s new sort-of documentary “A Flag Without a Country” declares itself to be scripted from the lives of its subjects, making it a spiritual cousin of “No One Knows About Persian Cats” – his 2009 film about two Iranian musicians trying to leave the country – which blurred the distinctions between invented characters and nonactors playing themselves into a continuous smudge. It worked then in urban Iran, and it works again now in beleaguered Kurdistan, where a much thinner helping of anything resembling a narrative is balanced by wider humanitarian concerns. “Flag” and “Cats” may share some kindred drollery, but it feels like Mr. Ghobadi has found a suitably fissile material for his method in the faces of Kurdish children scanning a horizon only just far enough away to conceal the ISIS fighters hurrying toward them, as if the interlocking sadnesses of northern Iraq were now dense enough for documentary truth to become bent by gravity on its way out.
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