Synopsis & Film Details
The “magic realist” documentary The First Movie pays tribute to the imaginative resilience of children. When the filmmaker and his crew travel to Goptapa, a small Kurdish village in northern Iraq devastated by Saddam Hussein’s regime, they discover kids who have known nothing but war their entire lives and have never experienced the magic of movies. The crew sews together a movie screen from old sheets and sets up a projector, creating a makeshift theater that plays children’s classics in the village center. But the real magic happens when the kids receive Flip Video camcorders and set out to create their own movies. The result: a ticket to see a truly different and inspiring Iraq, through a child’s transformative eyes.