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While the cinema of Kurdistan isn't known for its yuks, there are a couple of gentle doozies in Kurdish-American filmmaker Jano Rosebiani's culture-examining tragicomedy, such as the broken truck that's sold for its "automatic horn" or the restaurant patron impatiently waiting for his fish meal, not knowing it has yet to be claimed from the river.

Yet the overall comic premise is both clumsy and truly icky, because how exactly do you make progressive good on a "parody of violence against women" logline?

Greedy for a dowry, a Kurdish villager marries off his teenage daughter Viyan (Katrin Ender) to the wealthy Haji Hemmo (Kurdo Galali), a nasty codger much older than his new father-in-law. Refusing to sleep with the creep, Viyan hides out in a tree, only to be beaten mo...

The glorious centerpiece of 1982's Fitzcarraldo, in which Klaus Kinski's lunatic outsider undertakes his passion project of bringing opera to the people of Iquitos, Peru, by having a ocean liner pulled over a mountain, was an iconic feat for both the film's bigger-than-life hero and director Werner Herzog.

By extreme contrast, self-taught Kurdish-American filmmaker Jano Rosebiani's mostly English-language drama — tracking an incomprehensible quest to project washed-out Charlie Chaplin shorts in the remote villages of northern Iraq — is deadened by milquetoast characters, uninspired landscape photography, and no perceptible stakes.

Nyu students David (Zack Gold) and Alan (Bennett Viso) are joined on their cross-cultural road trip by a local TV star (K...