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Film's Night

Film's Night

(Filmová noc), Various / Various, 2000
original version / Czech subtitles, 374 min

Kilomètre zéro
Iraq, 1988. Young husband and father Ako is forced to join Saddam Hussein's army. The unwilling soldier dreams of fleeing the country, but his wife Selma refuses to leave while her old bedridden father is still alive. Ako is sent away to the frontline of the Iran-Iraq War, where he experiences not only the reality of war, but also abuse due to his Kurdish background. The desperate man considers drastic measures for a fast ticket home. Ako thinks it's his lucky day when he receives orders to escort the return of a fellow soldier's corpse to his family. But his driver turns out to be an anti-Kurd Arab. With flag-wrapped coffin in tow, the mismatched duo prepares for an unexpected voyage across the majestic Iraqi landscape. Ako won't miss his chance to trick the driver into heading north toward the Kurdistan region...

No Man's Land
After various skirmishes, two wounded soldiers, one Bosnian and one Serb, confront each other in a trench in the no man's land between their lines. They wait for dark, trading insults and even finding some common ground; sometimes one has the gun, sometimes the other, sometimes both. Things get complicated when another wounded Bosnian comes to, but can't move because a bouncing mine is beneath him. The two men cooperate to wave white flags, their lines call the UN (whose high command tries not to help), an English reporter shows up, a French sergeant shows courage, and the three men in no man's land may or may not find a way to all get along.

Vodka Lemon
In a remote, isolated village in post-Soviet Armenia, Hamo, a widower with a pitiful pension and three worthless sons, travels daily to his wife's grave. There he meets the lovely Nina, who is communing with her late husband. The two are penniless--she works in a local bar that is about to close down, while he has been forced to start selling his meager possessions. All seems hopelessly bleak, yet as Hamo begins to court Nina, their unexpected union revitalizes them.

Intervention Divine
A comedy-drama love story between a Palestinian man living in Jerusalem and a Palestinian woman from Ramallah, set in the tense political context of their two adjacent cities that are divided by a guarded checkpoint. The lovers arrange clandestine meetings with each other, which include parking their cars on either sides of the checkpoint, just so that they can hold hands at the border.