Lone Star Film Festival - My Marlon and Brando

Run time: 93 min. | Turkey, Netherlands, UK

In March 2003, as American bombs began falling on Baghdad, Turkish actress Ayca Damgaci left her flat in Instanbul and headed for the Iraq border. Behind that cordon was Kurdish actor Hama Ali Khan, the love of Damgaci's life-her moon and stars, her Marlon and her Brando, her everything. Huseyin Karabey makes his narrative debut retelling the tale of Damgaci's quixotic road trip to the war zone, with Damgaci playing herself and Khan appearing in the actual video love note notes he sent to her during their time apart. My Marlon and Brando is a piece of rough magic, a film with a soul as light, a heart as heavy, and a will as stelly as its heroine's own. Communicating in English, their shared tongue, Damgaci's clumsy grasp of the language elevates into rhetoric all the more moving for being flawed. Likewise, through Khan;s ham-fistedly hilarious videos, you miss him on Dagmaci's behalf. Politics may turn this comedy about unlikely lovers into a tragedy, but even in its fleeting ungainliness, My Marlon and Brando is a fitting homage to Damgaci and Khan, two matched souls that no impassable border could ever tear usunder.

Information from the festival's website