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| Zamani barayé masti asbha, Iran 2000 |
The Northern Iran winters are so cold that the
Kurdish smugglers who live there feed their mules alcohol so that they
will carry loads over the mountain passes. In this world of high-risk
border crossings and death by land mine, a fatherless young boy named
Ayoub scrapes out a living doing odd tasks, supporting his sisters and
crippled brother. This may seem like a recipe for seventy-seven minutes
of misery, but the director Bahman Ghobadi’s affection for his
subjects gives the film a certain lightness. He takes the raw materials
of his homeland – the harsh landscape, communal rooms, and lambent-eyed
children – and fashions a visual poem. Ghobadi documents his subjects
without intruding, and the results are quietly enthralling. –
Michael Agger, The New Yorker Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi returned to his native village near the Iran-Iraq border to make his feature debut, the first Iranian film in Kurdish. Reminiscent of Italian neorealism, A Time for Drunken Horses uses non-actors to tell the heartrending story of a family of poor orphans desperate to find money to pay for an operation for their handicapped brother, Madi. Madi is a teenager who's no bigger than a two-year-old and suffers from terrible pain that expensive medicine only partly relieves. His time is clearly running out, but his five young siblings are devoted to him and try everything in their limited power to prolong his life. The eldest sister agrees to marry a man from Iraq with the understanding that her in-laws will pay for Madi's operation and is devastated when they refuse. Then 12-year-old Ayoub joins a group of smugglers driving horses loaded with contraband over the border – the film's title comes from the smugglers' practice of lacing the horses' water with alcohol so they'll keep working. More grim and less sentimental than other Iranian films featuring plucky children, this strikingly photographed work stresses the harshness of daily life in Iranian Kurdistan. It shared the Camera d'Or for best first feature at Cannes with Djomeh, another Iranian film. – Alissa Simon, Chicago Reader I was born in Baneh, Iran’s closest border
town to Iraq. It was the most dangerous area. It had the highest Iranian
casualties both in internal conflicts as well as during the war with
Iraq. The village where I then took refuge for three months was where
I later shot A Time for Drunken Horses. |
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