Word: samira
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According to a former secretary to Saddam, the strongman's second wife Samira is in Beirut with the children from her first marriage and her grandchildren. Saddam and Samira are rumored to have had a son named Ali, but the family butler says there is no such person. (Saddam does have a nephew named Ali.) The young man mistakenly known on the Baghdad street as Ali, according to the butler, is actually Samira's grandson Saif, 20. The butler and the former secretary claim that the marriage contract between Saddam and Samira specified that she not bear him any children...
...Samira and Saddam were close, says the secretary. "He listened to what she told him." But a Pentagon official in Iraq says the U.S. has little interest in the female relatives, noting that Iraqi women are usually kept out of men's affairs. The U.S., he adds, has no reason to think Saddam's wives and daughters would know his whereabouts. "If they came in here, I'd offer them tea," the official said in his Baghdad office. --By Daren Fonda. Reported by Brian Bennett and Simon Robinson/Baghdad
...genial comedy-drama about a dying professor (French Canada's The Barbarian Invasions), a minimalist study of two cousins getting on each other's nerves (the Turkish Uzak), and the one Asian awardee, At Five in the Afternoon, set in Afghanistan and directed by 23-year-old Iranian Samira Makhmalbaf...
...Samira Makhmalbaf's filmmaking father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf?who directed the superb, Afghan-set Kandahar (2001)?helped finance Sedigh Barmak's Osama, the hit of the Directors' Fortnight. Set in the early days of Taliban rule and based on a true story, it tells of an 11-year-old girl whose mother sends her out with a short haircut and long robes to find work as a "boy" and support the family. It's a reckless ruse, one with potentially fatal consequences. The girl is taken to the men-only prayer ritual, and attends instruction by a mullah in the proper...
...Afghanistan. Sedigh Barmak's Osama takes place in the early days of Taliban rule: to earn money for her family, a desperate woman disguises her 11-year-old daughter as a boy. It is a reckless ruse, one with humiliating consequences, which Barmak directs with poignant simplicity. Samira Makhmalbaf's At Five in the Afternoon is set just after the Taliban's fall, when young women have earned the right to go to school but not the respect of their conservative fathers. The film shimmers and shudders with hopeful and horrifying vignettes. Girls declare themselves ready to be doctors, teachers...