Kurdish director Jano Rosebiani’s movie is about two NYU film students (Zack Gold and Bennett Viso) screening Charlie Chaplin movies for the peasants in the mountains of his native country.
But the heart of the plot is Nazé (Estelle Bajou), a young woman who’s grown up in France, but whose mother was Kurdish, forced out during Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign in the late 1980s. Nazé wants to locate her mother’s village, and she joins up with the two American Chaplin-lovers, one of whom is half-Kurdish like herself.
There’s a great deal of breathtaking scenery, and Rosebiani blends the travelogue vistas with a sense of what daily existence is like in these villages. The Kurds respond to Chaplin — as indeed everyone does — but life intrudes on the screenings time and again, with interruptions that include both a wedding dance and an escaped herd of goats.
The road-trip conceit is a bit formulaic, clearly used so that Rosebiani can bring up all the tortured recent history of the Kurds. The actors aren’t bad, but their scripted lines sometimes lapse into message delivery. Yet there’s a simplicity and directness in “Chaplin of the Mountains” that keeps it aloft; its wholehearted sincerity feels much fresher than any number of slicker, more cynical films.