Avuncular American

My Sweet Pepper Land

Hiner Saleem made My Sweet Pepper Land, set in his native Iraqi Kurdistan, a year or so before the world awakened to the barbarity of "the Islamic State" roaring into northern Iraq.  But you can't watch this superlative film without thinking of the IS threat to the Kurds and their imperfect but hopeful society in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods.

Pepper Land has been compared to a Western, and when the village bridge gets blown up by Turkish jet fighters in their guerrilla war with the Kurdish rebels who sometimes cross over into Iraq, horseback is the best mode of transport for Baran, the local police commander.

And he has to do battle, not with evil cattle barons, but with an evil traditional chieftan, who seems to have the whole town in his pocket.

If you think you've read the plot before, that's where the Western analogy ends.  Be prepared for serious treatment of the place of women in a traditional Muslim society (other than Baran's mother, who appears only briefly, the women are most definitely not headscarfed).  Govend, the local one-room school teacher, is set on bringing a bit of light to an otherwise benighted village, but she has an uphill battle as a single woman, already over the hill as an unmarried 28 year old.

And don't mess with those Kurdish women fighters, who operate in the hills between Turkey and Iraq (the film appears to be set in the years just after the fall of Saddam Hussein, when war-weary Iraqi Kurds fear Turkish wrath for sheltering PKK guerrillas).  Again, you can't help but thinking of the thin line dividing Iraq from the medieval decapitators, with Peshmerga Kurds (often including female fighters) the only force standing in their way.

Inevitably, Govend and Baran, the two outsiders who challenge local ways, are brought together.  The role of Govend the school teacher who dares to make her own way in the world is one that perfectly suits Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani, who has so challenged her own country's conservative leadership that she doubts that she can ever return there (read this extensive profile in Spiegel Online International).

Hiner Saleem doesn't sugarcoat the situation in Kurdistan: there are numerous references to corruption and "bizness" by public servants, and Baran's frustration with post-Peshmerga life is encapsulated at the outset by a semi-comic botched execution of a criminal, where a smug Imam is the film's only reference to religion.

My Sweet Pepper Land is one of the best recent films out of the Middle East; it was featured ("Un Certain Regard") at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

National Fixer Upper

In a blog post on the doldrums currently besetting France, a photo of a "For Sale" sign on a forlorn house might have been more appropriate.  But how much more pleasant to contemplate the reflection in the river Aulne (part of the Nantes-Brest Canal) of Chateaulin, a market town at a key crossroad leading to Brittany's Crozon peninsula, where we spent the better part of August.

Chateaulin has its position to thank for its relative economic health - you can't avoid the place with its single bridge across the river.  But this past month has revealed many smaller towns and villages in Brittany's scenic central Finistère where it's deadsville - those sales signs have been up for a long time, and people aren't buying.

August is supposed to be deadsville in France: whole companies close down, even government ministers are allowed some time off.  But that's exactly when things livened up this year, with a roller coaster ride of ministers and former ministers breaking ranks and criticizing political and economic decisions, leading to yet another government shakeup.

And one of the areas singled out for reform has been a disastrous housing policy.

In Brittany's Finistère, we passed through countless towns where it's hard to see how to counter the decline in the real estate sector.  How can young people, even if not among the ranks of the unemployed, afford to buy a house?

There are lots of "fixer uppers," of course, but government policy will have to provide lots of encouragement.  Zero percentage loans - so far reserved for new construction - are now also to be extended to older home purchases.

Maybe that's what France, and perhaps the United States, need to help spur economic activity where it's most needed.  A kind of national fixer upper campaign, where the laudable goal of home ownership - strong in both countries - would be supported by wise fiscal policies.

The DIY way to economic revival.

For Whom the Tocsin Tolls - World War I Centenary

At 4:00 PM this Friday afternoon, all across France, the church steeples echoed the sound of the tocsin, a reminder of the "Guns of August" of 1914.

Today, life pretty much continued as usual, and other than a few officials in ceremonies around the country, I doubt many people stopped what they were doing to reflect on that distant conflict and what it meant for the world.

My wife's late aunt, a girl of almost seven when war was declared in August 1914, recalled that people working in the fields dropped their tools - it was right in the middle of harvest season - so immediate was the effect.

Within weeks, thousands would be dead.  And the thousands became millions.

Here in Brittany, far from the WW I battlefields of northern France, the war nevertheless was felt, and with devasting results.  On the "Monument aux Morts" of my wife's native village, her uncle's name appears.  He had been gassed, and died in hospital in Caen in Normandy:

On the same monument, the names of eight village soldiers killed the same day on a faraway battlefield in Belgium, just three weeks after trading their rakes for rifles (photo below).  On August 22, 1914, before the glory faded on the bright blue and red French uniforms with the deadly, muddy dreariness of five subsequent winters, France came to the aid of Belgium in the earliest days of the war.  There's a Belgian blog with information on the battle of Maissin.

Imagine the impact on a rural farming community such as this Breton village - seven of its sons killed on the same day.  In Britain, early pre-conscription recruitment resulted in "Pals Battalions," consisting of relatives, friends and neighbors.  As Wikipedia puts it:

The policy of drawing recruits from amongst a local population ensured that, when the pals battalions suffered casualties, individual towns, villages, neighbourhoods, and communities back in Britain were to suffer disproportionate losses.

I hadn't realized what this would mean to a small Breton village until I took in the names and dates on the monument.

The great British military historian John Keegan referred to the "chateau generalship" exhibited during the war, depicted so well in Stanley Kubrick's timeless "Paths to Glory."  Today, we watch contemporary wars - never "declared," such a quaint concept - while munching on our evening meals.

If the First World War seems so distant, its effects are very much with us now.  Think of the empires dissolved, the countries born of WW I.  And the seeds of nationalism sown.  You can play counterfactual history to no end with World War One: if it hadn't happened, would the Soviet Union and the Cold War happened?  Would Israel have come about without the 1917 Balfour Declaration?  Without the humiliating defeat of Germany and the Central Powers, would Hitler have risen to power and unleashed the Holocaust?

There are helpful websites to keep track of the complex history of The Great War: PBS and BBC's World War One are among the best.  But like today's tocsin, it's a somber, long four years that we're commemorating.  Next time you're outside for a few minutes in a dismal November rain, spare a thought for the soldiers - Tommies, Doughboys, or poilus - in their muddy trenches.

It all started 100 years ago today.