Madonna of Mesopotamia: A traveling club singer discovers herself in Iraq

-- Before she watched soldiers shoot a man on the streets of Northern Iraq, before she talked to the woman who said that being imprisoned with her two children for triple homicide was better than the life she lived with the husband and in-laws she murdered, before she spent a month shooting a film in a language she did not speak, playing a victim of rape and familial abuse, in a beautiful but war-torn country, among people who had a violent feud with her own bloodline, Ozzie Aziz was just a normal, drag-queen-and-midget-loving, S&M-garbed, Madonna-wannabe club singer. --

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-- Bekhal's Tears is the result of the collaboration of two ''soul-mates'' (Aziz's word) who are descended from ethnic groups locked in a historic conflict: Kurdish filmmaker Lauand Omar and Cypriot Turk Aziz. A rare cinematic expression of Kurdish life, it's one of the first films to be shot in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. The movie, sometimes amateurish in its shaky editing, shows the mountainous beauty of a region that has become synonymous with violence. It's a moving story of troubled, traditional people coming to terms with the weapons and ways of Western society, and particularly of a humble daughter determined to make a change. --

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-- Bekhal's Tears depicts a family not standing by each other, but turning on a daughter who brings ''disgrace'' after her fiancé rapes her. When the film premiered in Kurdistan, it got a standing ovation. ''The young people loved it,'' Omar says. Then during the press conference, audience members accused the filmmakers of being outsiders showing a false picture of Iraq.

''There was a lot of anger,'' Omar says. ``Some, mostly men, [verbally] attacked me, saying that such problems do not exist in their society, and who was I to come here and make them all look bad in other countries? ... That's when I realized that I was achieving what I wanted. The movie touched the people.'' --