By Robert Avila

BOB HOPE'S 100TH birthday augurs a spate of road-picture reruns in the coming months: Hope and Crosby yucking it up, crooning and romancing, on studio soundstages decked out in images of one or more exotic locales. And though they never actually went anywhere, what a long strange trip it's been, especially considering where the road picture has brought us since the days of such Hollywood high jinks. Today's newest road picture, from a Hollywood extraterrestrial, Kurdish Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, hails from just the kind of exotic locale Bob and Bing might have safely pretended to saunter off to. The title, Marooned in Iraq, even sounds like a Bob Hope movie. Dispensing humor, romance, and song, its stars, though unknowns and nonactors, have all of the charisma the screen can hold, too. The setting, meanwhile – the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq and Iran – is no flickering celluloid backdrop but a war-wrecked region only too real, these days even to the usually oblivious American public. And therein lies the leading difference between this work and the Hollywood fare.

"My films are not intended to merely entertain the audience," Ghobadi explained to me when he was in town last month for the San Francisco International Film Festival. "They're not movies that would lie. Watching my film, you can see the real life of Kurdish people. By contrast, in Hollywood films you're seeing something that has no truth in it, something that doesn't exist in American society."

Ghobadi's rousing follow-up to A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) revisits the Kurdish lives straddling the border region between Iran and Iraq. Set as Saddam Hussein's bombs and chemicals stir a mass exodus to the Iranian border – in the wake of the notorious 1988 Halabja massacre and the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War – the story follows renowned Kurdish singer Mirza (real-life crooner Shahab Ebrahimi) as he goes in search of ex-wife Hanareh (Iran Ghobadi) after receiving a plea for help. Mirza must use a ruse to roust his two reluctant musician sons, Barat (Faegh Mohammadi) and Audeh (Allah-Morad Rashtian), into taking the perilous journey with him: he tells them he never really divorced Hanareh. Loading onto Barat's motorcycle and sidecar, they thus set off on a journey across the border from Iran to Iraq (the opposite direction to the multitudes fleeing Hussein) in the hope of tracking her down. Across a colorful landscape, the film's scrappy characters weave through adventures big and small. Unlike Ghobadi's beautiful yet somber debut film, Marooned in Iraq frequently crackles with humor and an almost madcap energy.

"After I finished A Time for Drunken Horses, I really wanted to do something different," Ghobadi said, "something that really had the essence of Kurdish people in it. My land is filled with stories, one stranger than the next. I was looking for a scenario that would contain all these stories." The result is a surprisingly buoyant picture with darkly comic shadings reminiscent of Emir Kusturica's films (which Ghobadi cites as a particular influence). "This spirit actually comes from Kurdish culture and manifests itself in the music and the humor. They use these tools to cope with their situation."

Nevertheless, as the genocidal campaign against the Kurds intrudes on the irrepressible mood of the film, the story gently gives way to a poignant meditation on loyalty, sacrifice, and endurance amid the arbitrary cruelty and merciless uncertainty of war. By the final sequence, as Mirza trudges through a howling, snow-swept field adjoining Iran, carrying Hanareh's daughter Sanooreh (whose name means "border") on his back, Marooned in Iraq has assumed the visage of A Time for Drunken Horses. "The endings of both films are the same, and I did that deliberately," Ghobadi explained. "This particular story doesn't belong to just this particular group but to many, and is still going on. Borders are the subject here. Borders have created a lot of suffering and devastation in Middle Eastern countries."

The Kurds, who, at more than 20 million strong, comprise the largest single ethnic group without a country, were also without a cinema until recently. But Ghobadi, who's convinced that "cinema can completely change the foundation of a society," has given them one. "Kurdistan was always the center of warlike films full of violence. I was looking for a different look, a different perception, not just Kurds with guns. We wanted to show Kurds with cameras. And now, after these two films, there are so many filmmakers in Kurdistan it's like a virus! Everyone is making films!"