Nowadays its a customary to take the acclaimed short movies to stretch for the feature films by the incoming directors. All they need is a good producer and the distributors, the actors can be managed with the new faces. Yep, this movie was inspired by the short film of the same name like 'Short Term 12', 'District 9' et cetera. Most importantly, these films met a great success because of the beautiful story, characters and narration.
This movie was directed by the Iraq born filmmaker who is now residing in Sweden. Most of the recent movies, in fact, all of them outlines Iraq as a war field. But this film was such a poetic, shot in the real locations, brings a calm and beautiful 90s Iraq on the screen that you have probably never seen in a decade. The main two characters were inspired by the director and his elder brother, when they were kids and lived in the Kurdish part of Iraq. But the story was marginally fictional except the dreams of the children from the third world.
I must agree, this movie practically describes how the influence of American products, films and culture affects the young kids from a country like Iraq. Their over obsession leads to dream bigger without knowing that's impossible to make it true. If you are a non-American you would have had such obsession in your childhood on soft drinks like Cola, Pepsi, or fast foods like from KFC, McDonald, or TV cartoons and Marvel Comic books et cetera. So, in some way, somewhat it's a tiny part of your story as well.
"If a family is united, they will be strong."
There is no exact one word translation for 'Bekas'. It means 'homeless orphans' according to the director's explanation during an interview at one of the film festivals. This movie is all about two young Kurdish boys, Dana and Zana, and Superman, Michael Jackson and Coca Cola. If we talk about the story, it's when 'Slumdog Millionaire' meets 'In This World'. The movie begins similar fashion to SDM where kids are playing football and after that go straight to their business, instead school. In fact many scenes resemble above two films I mentioned and also other films. When the brothers get separates, that kind of reminded me 'The Gods Must Be Crazy 2'. Thus the screenplay originality lacks, other than that it is nothing less than to consider a wonderful film.
There are some scenes that make you go edge of your seat. Grabs our attention, creating tensions and thrills in the scenes like check-post and landmines. Emotions did not strike well because it's seemed more like a dark comedy. A bit commercialised than being realistic. The music was so good, awesome blend to portray the adventures, along with the two great performances, ignited the movie to emerge as a pleasant family entertainer. There might be millions of reasons to blame this movie because of similarity with other films and other stuffs, but overall I felt happy. Criticisers still going to criticize it, despite those flaws definitely worth to check it out.
