Fratricide

The film's opening dedication to Pasolini acknowledges Arslan's debt to Neorealism, but the gritty, documentary style is offset by a charming bit of chalkboard animation that helps lighten the mood considerably.

Fratricide marks Arslan as one of Europe's hottest young talents, drawing simultaneously on the film traditions of America, Western Europe and the Middle East.

Nonprofessional actors and convincingly dingy details give Fratricide a harsh documentary quality, and its "Midnight Cowboy"-style ending is bitterly powerful. Devotees of seamy '70s cinema should give this little film a look.

Shot with such grit that the lenses seem coated with grease, Fratricide offers a myopic impression of an unnamed German city, and that's probably the point, since so much of its territory and opportunities are sealed off from these immigrant characters.

A well-wrought, beautifully lensed but ultimately hopeless tale, Fratricide provides a less than optimistic allegory for the intractability of human conflicts: Even far away and decades later, old wars bring fresh miseries.

While the boys' fates do seem a little too predestined, that may well be Arslan's intention. When you're idling in no man's land, it's all too easy to get uprooted.

Every so often, Mr. Arslan cuts to Kurdistan, where a group of women wander the barren landscape, a Greek chorus gone astray in a film gone amiss.