Ako is a Kurdish man living with his wife, son and sick father-in-law. He urges flight to avoid the horrors of the Anfal Campaign and the Saddam Hussein years, but is drafted into the military before they can go. While there and under the constant mistreatment of his fellow soldiers because of his Kurdish ethnicity, he plots a way to get discharged quickly. And so he accepts a mission to escort the body of a fallen soldier home across the hostile Iraqi landscape back to Kurdistan. Hiner Saleem is a noted advocate of Kurdish rights who has been living away from Kurdistan since he was 17 years old. For the first time since he fled to Italy, he returned to the country to film Kilometre Zero. Saddam Hussein haunts the film, as does Kurdish genocide, but Saleem has managed to make a film about war and oppression that is hopeful and never depressing. "It′s not a political film," he says. "I′m just someone in passing who observes what′s going on in the world and tells stories about it."