Immediately after Saddam Hussein's fall, the prizewinning director of A Time for Drunken Horses and Marooned in Iraq travels to Iraq to arrange screenings of his work. An Iranian Kurd himself, Bahman Ghobadi is eager to bring cinema back to people for whom it has ceased to exist. Upon arriving in Baghdad, however, he discovers that film screenings are a soft target for terrorist attacks, and that people are afraid to attend. So he travels to the Kurdish region in the north, where everybody he encounters attests to the brutality of Saddam's regime. Women eternally garbed in black search in hope of finding the remains of relatives who vanished. This impromptu sketchbook, a kind of prelude to a feature film Ghobadi is now completing entitled The Turtles Too Fly, is edited in a way that reflects the postwar confusion. It succeeds in capturing an unforgettable slice of reality. The War is Over! will screen on the same program with another just-completed documentary, made by an Iraqi Kurd who is a friend of Ghobadi's. For his film, Jano Rosebiani, who had returned to Iraq at start of the war, had a more specific goal in mind: to document Saddam's Mass Graves, and the suffering of the Kurdish people.

Directed by

Bahman Ghobadi