STILL WAITING FOR THE SWEDES:

No 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' film depicts war in Iraq as liberation (Peter Ford, 5/23/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

Twelve months after Michael Moore scooped Cannes' top award with "Fahrenheit 9/11," - a scathing indictment of the Bush adminstration's handling of the war in Iraq - a very different movie director screened a very different view of the war at the world's premier cinematic gathering.

Director Hiner Saleem did not win the Golden Palm this year. But his film "Kilometre Zero" created a good deal of buzz at the competition, which closed on Saturday, not least because of its final scene.

"We're free! We're free!" two Iraqi Kurdish exiles shout exultantly as they hear the news of Saddam Hussein's overthrow on April 9, 2003. "We're free! We're free!"

That joyous reaction to the invasion of Iraq is not likely to go down well with the European audiences who idolized Mr. Moore. But Mr. Saleem, an Iraqi Kurd, is equally worried about being adopted as a standard-bearer by the war's supporters.

"My film is not the opposite of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' because I don't judge George Bush or the United States," Saleem says. " I judge Saddam Hussein and I simply say he was a monster."

As the primary victims of Mr. Hussein's brutality, subjected to poison gas and mass executions, "we Kurds would have been happy if the French or the Swedes had liberated us," he adds. "But it was the Americans who came. For us, the result is positive."