A short film that serves as a tale about the possibility of empathy far beyond any border. A kite flying over a river in a Kurdistan valley, on the border between Iran and Iraq. On the other side of the barbed wire, a girl asks for help in retrieving her toy. On this side, three young men try to understand her, but the distances represent an obstacle: first, they cannot hear; then, the request is written in Kurdish, a language they ignore. What separates them is not just the language, nor the wire or the river, but the heavy history of conflicts in the region. Filmmaker Seyed Hosseini’s poetic sensibility reveals itself on the details: the shots are mostly wide (long or two-shots), exploring the mountainous landscape, and the camera never gets close to the girl, so her face is not needed to create an empathic connection; in the distance, several overloaded immigrants cross the mountain ranges, and on the branches of the trees remain what appear to be colorful threads from old kites. “The Kites” is a movie that uses childhood as a point of view to problematize moral and political issues, in a humanist approach that owes a lot to fellow Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. (AJM)