3 stars

My Sweet Pepper Land is very much a traditional western, except that it is set in modern-day Kurdistan, post-Saddam Hussein’s fall, using AK-47 instead of pistols. Baran is a tough former resistance fighter who, rather than return home and face his mother’s attempts at marrying him off, goes to an isolated mountain area on the Turkish border as the new policy commandant. There he meets the beautiful Govend, the maths teacher at the local school, and clashes with the local lord who controls profitable trafficking routes. One man upholding the law against local barons with a romantic, if very slow paced, story in the middle is hardly new; it is a sweet story, running the expected course.

Director Hiner Saleem has cleverly fit the wild Western frontier mentality into the contemporary reality of the Kurdish region between Iraq and Turkey, and the result is an innovative film. It is full of references to the political reality of the region and addresses important issues such as the gender inequality; Govend, as she says herself, is already on the shelf at 28 years old, past marrying age or considering guns and women as representative of a man’s honour. This is a portrait of a changing society that, while coming into contact with a much wider world, still has certain ancestral ideas deeply ingrained.

My Sweet Pepper Land sparks some laughter at times, seems like a farce at others, and yet still manages moments of tense drama. In Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish, it is a glimpse at a part of the world we rarely get the chance to explore in the West. What it is shows is that there might just be a future for the modern western.

Rodolfo Barradas