Set in 1988, the young man Ako is conscripted to fight (along with his fellow Kurds) for the armed forces of Iraq in their conflict with Iran. The draft process is fraught with ethnic hatred and the newly-inducted soldiers conduct the fight only with an eye to helping themselves to find a way home, even if it means a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Ako gets a chance to return home as part of a funereal honor guard, traveling with an Arab driver in a truck carrying a flag-draped coffin. As the body rots in the hot mid-Eastern sun the Arab and the Kurd unsuccessfully suppress their animosity towards each other. The hatred which continues to this day (although it is both Shiite and Sunni Arabs who hate each other as well as hating the Kurds) lends but a small sense of the tragedy that is inevitable in ethnic conflicts. A tragedy seemingly mocked throughout the film by a statue of Saddam Hussein sitting on the back of a flatbed truck, running about the countryside in constant salute, mutely exhorting Iraqis to the greater glory of the state.
Ako does get home, and his family's story is somewhat resolved at the end as we fade to April 9, 2003 in Paris. On this day we see Ako and his wife together in Paris, jubilant at the news of the US taking of Baghdad. At this point the current-in-time viewer realizes how this movie lives up to its name: given the state of Iraq in early 2006 three years after the US invasion, we know that is where Iraq today is at Kilometer Zero.
Ako gets a chance to return home as part of a funereal honor guard, traveling with an Arab driver in a truck carrying a flag-draped coffin. As the body rots in the hot mid-Eastern sun the Arab and the Kurd unsuccessfully suppress their animosity towards each other. The hatred which continues to this day (although it is both Shiite and Sunni Arabs who hate each other as well as hating the Kurds) lends but a small sense of the tragedy that is inevitable in ethnic conflicts. A tragedy seemingly mocked throughout the film by a statue of Saddam Hussein sitting on the back of a flatbed truck, running about the countryside in constant salute, mutely exhorting Iraqis to the greater glory of the state.
Ako does get home, and his family's story is somewhat resolved at the end as we fade to April 9, 2003 in Paris. On this day we see Ako and his wife together in Paris, jubilant at the news of the US taking of Baghdad. At this point the current-in-time viewer realizes how this movie lives up to its name: given the state of Iraq in early 2006 three years after the US invasion, we know that is where Iraq today is at Kilometer Zero.