Un temps pour l'ivresse des chevaux

I wasn't sure where this movie was going for the first 15 minutes, but before long I was drawn into the story like the rest of the audience. This could be considered in the "Indy" film class, but whatever rough edges it might have only add to the impact of the story. Reason tells me it was fiction, but I really had the feeling we were there, or at least that one of the characters was filming the whole thing with a handicam.

The filmmaker did what he set out to do: He make a film that makes us care about some of his people. The conditions these people struggle under are appalling, and are made all the more difficult by politics. My girlfriend and I left the theatre wondering where we could find out more about these people and what can be done for them.

The young actors, especially Madi, are as good as - and perhaps better than - any $20 million Hollywood superstar. This is Film, not a Hollywood formula flick, and the story is worth seeing, however bleak it may seem at times.

In his most recent film, "A Time for Drunken Horses," Director Bahman Ghobadi depicts the hardship of life in the Kurdish region straddling the border between Iran and Iraq.

At the beginning of the film, a truck full of children makes its way through the snowy Iranian mountains. The large group of children sing in Arabic about how the winding road makes them older. You get the sense that they don't really know what they are singing about, but the song is indicative of how many of these children will be thrust into the realities of adulthood with little warning and even less preparation.

A young Kurd, Ayoub, must avert government brutality and raise the money to pay for an operation for his ailing younger brother.

Their father has just been killed by authorities and the teen must work to provide for the rest of the family. The only way he can raise the money is by smuggling goods across the border from Iraq to Iran, risking extremely cold temperatures, land mines and military raids.

Much to his credit, Ghobadi uses locals instead of professional actors throughout the film. The children who portray the three major characters (Ayoub, his sister Amaneh and their young, disabled brother Madi) give brilliant, fresh performances. Ayoub and Amaneh are convincing as a brother and sister attempting to hold their family together.

These children shed real tears. In a particularly impressive moment, Ayoub wrestles to move a drunken mule who won't budge as troops with rifles converge on his convoy. The power of his fear and frustration lights up the screen.

By the same token, some of the adult actors are unprofessional and wooden. Minor characters, like Ayoub's uncle, are painful to watch as they attempt to act. But thankfully these characters are periphery.

As an artistic film coming from the Middle East, one might not expect much from the technical aspects of the film. The cinematography, however, rivals some of the slickest Hollywood productions. The sweeping ice-blue snow that lines the mountains in the film provides a stark contrast with the characters' bright costumes, particularly Madi's trademark, tiny yellow raincoat.

The textured sound design adds depth to the picture. The rich, crisp amplification of even the tiniest sounds are an example of the film's attention to detail. From the buttoning of a coat to the smacking of lips, small sounds stand out and give the film an intimate feel.

The film derives its title from the mules that are given alcohol so they'll traverse the snowy terrain.

At the end of the film, when Ayoub is trying to get Madi across the border, the drunken mules turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

And the ambiguous final shot will make you cringe.

Briskly paced, the film unearths beauty in simplicity. Ghobadi clearly is a talented director, and in this film about growing up too fast he paints a beautiful, sad picture.

Kurdistan isn't in your atlas, but it exists, the land of a people ignored by the post-Ottoman empire boundary makers and now living in eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and north-western Iran. This movie is set in a mountainous part of the Iraq-Iran border where the local Kurds eke out a living smuggling tea and tractor tyres by mule train from Iran into Iraq. (The return cargo seems to be school exercise books – what the mullahs of Iran have got against those I cannot imagine). No doubt they (the Iranian Kurds) are not on President Bush's Christmas card list, but their main customers are likely to be Kurds on the Iraqi side. The main problem though is not the authorities but bandits, eager to knock off the smuggler's loads.

The hero here is 12 year old Ayoub, who has to follow in his father's footsteps after the death of his father on a smuggling trip. As Dad stepped on a landmine this is a dangerous undertaking but Ayoub is determined to earn enough money for a operation to prolong the life (if only for a few months) of his severely crippled and retarded older brother. This sounds like blatant melodramatic manipulation, and it is, but it works.

Why does it work? There's the cinemaphotography, so perfectly lit and composed you might as well be standing there. There is excellent use of hand-held cameras, especially on the trail sequences. None of the actors is professional and the whole thing has a documentary air. Above all, the emotional bonds between the characters ring true. Perhaps when you have next to nothing your family becomes all-important, though the kinship bonds here seen to weaken quickly outside the immediate family circle. Kurdistan is a tough place and people are hard, and there's not much community support for the weak and frail. The young are expected to shape up fast, or fall by the wayside. As for the horses, well, animal rights activists would be run out of town.

Yet there is a stark beauty about the film that makes it hard to dismiss – the slow pace grows on you. Ayoub may be going to grow up as just another tough, ignorant, sexist tribesman, but we glimpse here (he is going to school) that he might do better. This is a remarkable and different film and a very good antidote to the recent stream of romantic comedies.

"Time of Drunken Horses" is an uncompromising film about love and perseverance. It closely resembles the Iranian film, "Color of Paradise", and the Chinese "Not One Less" in its simplicity and its unrelenting message as well as using skilled child and adult actors in real-life settings. Filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi reminds us up front that we in the West don't understand the plight of the Kurdish refugees, numbering 20 million in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. "Time of Drunken Horses" is both an important lesson as well as a powerful homage to the suffering Kurdish people. To its credit, the film does depict the suffering as sympathy but rather as heroic and noble. When children have to fight for work in the marketplace, usually carrying heavy contraband on their backs, or when they have to trudge through deep snow to return to their village, or when they sing childhood songs about how they are aging so fast, there is a surprising energy and enthusiasm. The film takes its viewpoint from three children - a teenage boy, Ayoub, placed in charge of a disintegrating family, his younger sister, Amaneh, and the crippled and sick brother, Madi. The father has died in a landmine accident and the step-mother is away leaving the children in the hands of an already burdened uncle with eight children of his own. Madi needs an operation to extend his life another 7 or 8 months; otherwise, he will died soon. The love extended to this midget child is remarkable from the brother and sisters (one even accepts marriage in exchange for obtaining the needed operation) to the kindly doctor who comes regularly to give injections. That is the one irony that this film plainly wants to get across. We are blest with modern medicine is at our fingertips and yet we can decide to withhold care if it appears to be futile. How, then, can we understand, in a society in which there is so little, the determination of one boy to extend the live of someone he truly loves when the odds are overwhelmingly against him. The final scene merely strengthens the powerful message of "Time of Drunken Horses" as the boy and his crippled brother valiantly march off in the snow to a future we know will not be pleasant.

The documentary style of this movie doesn't put us away from the drama of life in this Kurdish village in Iranian soil but on the border with Irak. People there make a living by smuggling goods over the border subject to the constant risk of mines and ambushes. This involves children as well as adults. Life is particularly hard for children who have also to work for a living either wrapping up objects in the towns or carrying heavy packages on their shoulder or conducting mules carrying them across the border in the middle of the harshest weather conditions and a hostile landscape, to be sold on the other side. This is also the story of a family of orphan children, one of them being a crippled boy whose siblings treat with extreme care and tenderness, trying to earn money enough to take him to Irak to be operated otherwise he'll die soon. The image style is simple and unadorned. The images speak indeed for themselves. This story tells us not only how people live in that region of the globe, showing their customs and culture, but also how poverty and hardness cannot untie there the bonds of love in the bosom of the family. Maybe something we could learn in our western societies.