Who has seen this?
It has already picked up a couple of awards.
shareI did - at the Berlinale this year. It was the European premiere and the director as well as the main actors were there.
Personally I thought the film was great!
Good story, very good actors, with a little bit of social critique included. Sad subject but I enjoyed the experience.
Thanks for the reply. I'll look out for it if it ever picks up a distributor in the US.
shareA little over-extended, but still very good. Worth seeing.
shareI saw it in Melbourne, Australia tonight. The actor who played Simon was sensational (and as an aside, reminded me of a French Bryan Brown). But I found overall that parts of the movie didn't quite gel well enough to fully drag me in emotionally.
I didn't quite believe the speed of Simon's transition from using the Kurds to impress his wife to pro-actively assisting them.
I also didn't 'believe' that Bilal could have got anywhere near the coast of England. I tried to look at it as an allegory, but the rest of the movie was sooooo based in reality that the Channel crossing just seemed farcical to me.
There were some fabulous moments though - the physical interaction between Simon and Bilal when Simon realises the medal has gone missing was one and Simon's comment about how Bilal walked 4000km and is willing to swim the Channel and he (Simon) couldn't even cross the road to get his wife back.
I'd give it 3.5 out of 5.
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It's on WNET tonight (right now).
shareGreat movie, it really touched me.
shareGood film, but I liked Eden a l'Ouest more.
http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=2408883
I just watched it and thought it wasn't anything special. Although it's surprising.
It was well directed, well paced, the subject matter interests me and for the most part it was well acted, but it never managed to draw me in.
A few of the details that irked me: how clean and well-off all the refugees seemed; the very boring and amateur-sounding score that was repeated again and again seemingly randomly (there was only one short piece of music); the cinematography that was quite beautiful and intriguing at first, but became more and more generic as the film unfolded; and the rather wooden acting of Firat Ayverdi (Bilal).
While I appreciate that the acting for Bilal should have been somewhat subdued, he only ever seemed to have one and a half expressions. When freaking out about being put back in a bag, hearing news of his girlfriend, getting into a fight with Simon - it was all almost the same expression.
I don't like to pick on people, but I really don't think Firat Ayverdi was up to the job, rather he was selected because of his perhaps good looks, ambiguous ethnicity and language ability. However if he were to work on his range a bit more I think he would be quite good, he just missed it in this film.
...but I really don't think Firat Ayverdi was up to the job...