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In Ghobadi's 'Half Moon', it's hope and pride against the
seemingly impossible |
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In Ghobadi's 'Half Moon', it's hope and
pride against the seemingly impossible
28.12.2007
Movie Review
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A man
is determined to travel to perform long banished
Kurdish music to celebrate the fall of Saddam
Hussein.
December
28, 2007
In less than a decade the Iranian Kurdish filmmaker
Bahman Ghobadi has become one of cinema's most
potent lyric poets. From an amalgam of broad comedy,
gentle absurdity and the harrowing consequences of
war, he sparks a deeply humanist alchemy in
unsentimental tales peopled by nonprofessional
actors. "Half Moon," Ghobadi's fourth feature since
his 2000 debut, "A Time for Drunken Horses,"www.ekurd.net
strikes a more
forthrightly elegiac tone than any of his preceding
work. At the center of the story is a revered
elderly composer who's determined to travel from
Iranian to Iraqi Kurdistan to celebrate the fall of
Saddam Hussein with a performance of long-banned
Kurdish music.
It's a journey driven by hope and pride and shadowed
by a sense of impossibility -- and mortality. Mamo
(Ismail Ghaffari) has planned the trip for seven
months, securing the necessary permits for himself
and his dozen adult sons, a ragtag collection of
musicians. With Kako (Allah Morad Rashtiani), a
Kierkegaard-quoting entrepreneur and cockfight
organizer, at the wheel of an old bus, the group
makes its way along winding mountain roads and, with
increasing difficulty, through police checkpoints. |
The famous Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi.
Half Moon, Winner of the 2006 Inspiration Award at
Mountain film in Telluride, and the Award at the
2004 Maui Film Festival. |
Apparently all of
Kurdistan and the international media await Mamo's
arrival in Iraq, but on the basis of a wise man's
omen, one of his sons urges him to cancel the trip.
Mamo won't be stopped, however, in his mission to
stage a joyous rebuke to decades of oppression. In
the film's boldest symbolism, the 1,334 residents of
a cloistered village -- female singers all, and
forbidden to perform publicly in Iran -- trill from
perches atop the roofs.
Ghobadi's films inhabit a territory of borders:
Kurdistan overlays the perimeters separating Iran,
Iraq and Turkey (whose bombs now plague the region).
But the intimations of death in "Half Moon" concern
an individual's fate, not regional politics.www.ekurd.net
At a feast, Ghobadi
focuses on the roll of the backgammon dice, and a
look of recognition passes between Mamo and one of
his sons like a prophecy.
One of seven projects commissioned for the New
Crowned Hope film series commemorating Mozart's
250th birthday, "Half Moon" -- whose title refers to
a late-arriving character, as fiercely practical as
she is angelic -- is an eloquent and audacious
lament.
"Half Moon." MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1
hour, 47 minutes. In Kurdish and Persian with
English subtitles. Exclusively at the ImaginAsian
Center, 251 S. Main St., downtown L.A. (between 2nd
and 3rd streets). (213) 617-1033.
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