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Bahman Ghobadi discusses his new feature, "Half Moon" |
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Bahman Ghobadi discusses his new feature,
"Half Moon" 22.2.2007
By Jim Quilty
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A comic
but mortal journey to the border of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Iranian Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi discusses
his new feature, "Half Moon," which for the most
part does not feature women singing
February
22, 2007 -
Interview
Beirut, -- It starts with a cockfight. Armed
with an ancient megaphone, a woolly haired,
mustachioed man named Kako (Allah Morad Rashtiani)
begins the proceedings with a quote from
Kierkegaard. He nods to a pair of kids holding an
accordion and a derbakeh, and the musical
accompaniment commences.
The faintly folkloric quality is shattered when
Kako's mobile phone rings. "Mamo?" he gasps, a
finger stuck in one ear so he can hear. "Quiet!"
The room - musicians, gamblers, cockerels and all -
falls silent. When Mamo speaks, he demands your full
attention.
The opening sequence of Bahman Ghobadi's "Niwemang"
("Half Moon") is representative of the whole. The
fourth feature from the Kurdish-Iranian writer and
director has all the elements those familiar with
his work have come to expect. |
The famous Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi |
"Half Moon" is replete with the stark landscapes and
end-of-the-world incongruities of his earlier films.
Ghobadi remains attached to simple stories of people
in movement colliding with obstacles, their
encounters accentuated by magical motifs. It's an
aesthetic mysticism, one that never softens Kurdish
realities.
It unfolds that Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari), a renowned
but ageing musician from Iranian Kurdistan, has
finally got permission to hold a concert in Iraqi
Kurdistan to celebrate the toppling of Saddam
Hussein. He dispatches Kako to gather a busload of
his musician sons for the concert.
The old man intends to do more than stage a concert.
He wants Iraqi Kurds to hear again the "celestial
voice" of his protege, Hesho (Hedye Tehrani). She
hasn't sung for years, having been exiled to a
village where 1,334 female singers have been exiled.
"What's that sound?" asks a son as they approach the
village.
"That," Mamo smiles grimly, "is the sound of 1,334
female voices. Singing."
The celestial voice is skeptical. Not only has she
not sung in years, she's picked up smoking. Mamo's
mission is haunted by his own mortality, as well.
One of his sons tells him a wise man in his village
has foretold tragedy on the day the concert is
scheduled to begin.
Mamo himself is given to moments of mystical
abstraction. We first find him in a graveyard, lying
in a freshly dug grave, his eyes open, staring at
the half moon sitting in the daytime sky - one of
many anomalies that litter the Kurdish landscape.
It sounds forbidding but, for those who wept through
the grim poetry of 2004's "Turtles Can Fly,"
Ghobadi's new film offers some relief.
"People say that I want [them] to cry with my
films," Ghobadi says. "In this film I want to make
you laugh."
"Half Moon" is no comedy but it does sometimes
smile. The picaresque story affords as much
opportunity for comedy as visual poetry.
When they start their journey, somebody asks Kako
about the scruffy cockerel that sits beside him on
the dashboard. "He's an orphan," he explains. "Both
his parents were killed in the ring. I'm waiting for
him to grow up so he can take revenge."
When Mamo joins the dozen or so of his sons Kako has
assembled on the bus, he tells one of them to write
an email to another son who's supposed to come visit
him from Germany. "Ask him again what time his plane
leaves," he instructs.
"Where should he send it?" asks the son pulling out
his laptop. "mamoinkurdistan @ yahoo.com?"
"Exactly," Mamo smiles.
Mamo and his retinue overcome many obstacles and
arrive at the Iraqi border, only to find the air
scoured with automatic rifle fire and no one to
greet them. They decide to take another route, only
to be intercepted by Iranian border police. They
ransack the bus, break all the instruments and take
Hesho prisoner.
Undaunted, Mamo and his remaining sons continue the
trip by another route, through western Azerbaijan.
He does find a celestial voice to replace Hesho -
the miraculous Niwemang (Golshifteh Farahani) - and
she does accompany him to the end of the road. The
barriers between him and his goal are more tenacious
than the magic, though, and the film ends firmly
ensconced in this world.
Ghobadi was commissioned to make "Half Moon" for the
New Crowned Hope festival, launched in Vienna last
year to honor the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart.
There's not a trace of European classical music
here, but Ghobadi insists Mozart is in the film.
"The film was inspired by his Requiem Mass," he
says. "Elements like the magic of music, death and
life, all Mozart's sentiments, are here."
Given the film's motif of obstacles coming between
artists and their audience, it's appropriate that
the version of "Half Moon" screened on the festival
circuit this year is not the one Ghobadi would have
chosen.
"This film is about women singing," Ghobadi sighs.
"Yet I am forbidden to show women singing. It's
about musicians going to a concert that never
happens.
"Basically what's been removed is seven minutes of
women dancing. The Iranian version has 10 minutes
less again. The seven minutes were removed because I
hoped the film could be released in Iran. Then
government people attacked me as a separatist in
Tehran newspapers. I denied it. 'Cut as much as you
want from this film,' I said, 'but please let
Iranians see it.'
"It would've cost me 40,000 euros to reincorporate
the footage I cut for the Iranian censor. There's no
way any independent filmmaker could afford this."
In critical circles Ghobadi enjoys a dual reputation
- in the second generation of Iranian filmmakers
(following Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
and the first generation of Kurdish filmmakers.
"I don't have much contact with Kurds outside Iran,"
he says. "I have two or three friends in Turkey. In
Iraq I have a few more. There is a nascent Kurdish
cinema, yet it's not a real cinema.
"Around five or six years ago there were estimated
to be 40 million Kurds - three million in Syria, 13
million in Turkey, five to six million in Iraq,
eight to nine million in Iran, another million
scattered through Russia and Armenia and two to
three million in the diaspora.
"You can't have cinema for a nation spread across
four countries with two [50-year-old] cinemas.
Screenings, if they happen at all, are very brief
... This is why we released this film illegally on
DVD ... actually on VHS tape, because DVD players
aren't so common in Kurdistan. I just gave it to my
friends at Kurdish television because they have no
money to pay for rights.
"They tell me many houses in Kurdistan, maybe 90
percent, have a pirated copy of 'A Time for Drunken
Horses' and when they want to entertain they take it
out and play it," he grins. "I'm delighted.
"Two or three months ago we went to northern Iraq
and a very old lady comes up to me and says: 'I've
heard a lot about you. I've never seen your work but
I've heard your name. You're a national treasure.'"
He holds up his hand and beams at a strip of green
cloth around his wrist. "She put this on me."
Ghobadi smiles at the public relations people
drawing artistic lines between himself and
Kiarostami - with whom he worked only once. He says
he became a filmmaker because of all he lived
through - the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war
and so forth. Yet in his films, aesthetic and
existential elements always trump political
rhetoric, not the case for other Kurdish filmmakers.
"I try to forget politics," he says. "But even if I
do, it comes back immediately through the film's
language - when you see a mine or a mine warning or
a person walking with crutches or handicapped
children. Politics imposes itself on our work."
dailystar com.lb
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