A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES Written and Directed by Bahman Ghobadi Plan B NR 80 min. Subtitles
Bahman Ghobadi's stunning debut film strips away the protective layer that separates an audience from the world that unfolds on the screen. We're transported almost bodily into the hardscrabble landscape of a Kurdish mountain village near Iran's border with Iraq.
This is a story of deprivation, a story of survival, but most of all it's a love story. It focuses on three children: Ayoub, his sister Ameneh, and their older brother Madi, who is a crippled dwarf. Their mother is dead, their father is a smuggler, and when he is killed the kids are pretty much on their own. Madi, with his doll-sized body and hunched back and eyes both childlike and inexpressibly old, needs regular injections and will require an operation to stay alive.
The two healthy children do what they can for Madi. The teenage Ameneh agrees to a marriage for a promise of help from the bridegroom's family. 12-year-old Ayoub shoulders a man's burden as a smuggler, hauling contraband over harsh snowy mountains through cold so bitter the pack mules are fed booze to keep them warm. The operation will buy Madi at most another year of life, but they never stop to weigh the cost. At that age, and through those uncompromisingly loving eyes, a year seems like a lot, and the alternative is unimaginable.
Ghobadi, who won the Camera d'Or at Cannes for best first film, tells his story from his heart and experience. He's from a Kurdish village much like this one. Ghobadi's style is simple and direct, and images such as little Madi riding like a solemn-eyed puppy in a mule's saddlebag are pictures you'll carry with you a long time.
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