The camera follows two musicians who, amid the protest of April 17, 2011 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq Kurdistan, play the motif composed by Ennio Morricone for the gunslinger duel in Sergio Leone’s movie Once Upon a Time in the West. Unlike the movie, though, the duel here is between unarmed people and the tear gas bombs of police repression. Asphyxiated by the gas, protesters use lemon juice as a detoxifying agent, and the fruity scent evokes another repression: Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attack against the Kurdish people in 1988, when chemical weapons left a smell of apple in the air and in the memory of the survivors. The video suggests that the story lingers on in the 2011 protests (in which at least 10 ten people died and 400 were injured) against a supposedly democratic Kurdish government.
