An
elderly Iranian Kurdish man, along with his two musician sons, crosses
into Iraq during Saddam’s destruction of the Kurds in the
wake of the Iran-Iraq war, in search of the woman who abandoned
him years ago. Odd, frantic mix of low comedy and blistering tragedy
sometimes suffers from overt symbolism, but director Bahman Ghobadi’s
love for his characters is authentic and powerful. In Kurdish, with
English subtitles. (1 hr. 37 mins.; NR) — BILGE EBIRI
Spotlight: Director Bahman Ghobadi
“The media shows the two or three hundred thousand people
who live by the gun. I make films to show how the rest of us live,”
says Bahman Ghobadi, the Kurdish director of Marooned
in Iraq, a surreal, darkly comic, and altogether timely road
movie about a musician searching for his ex-wife in the chaos after
the Iran-Iraq war. Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurd whose A Time for
Drunken Horses won Best First Film at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival,
is taking it upon himself to raise consciousness about the plight
of the Kurds. “I want to make that my mission,” says
the 33-year-old. “I only wonder if I’m going to live
long enough to tell all the stories I see.”
An
elderly Iranian Kurdish man, along with his two musician sons, crosses
into Iraq during Saddam’s destruction of the Kurds in the
wake of the Iran-Iraq war, in search of the woman who abandoned
him years ago. Odd, frantic mix of low comedy and blistering tragedy
sometimes suffers from overt symbolism, but director Bahman Ghobadi’s
love for his characters is authentic and powerful. In Kurdish, with
English subtitles. (1 hr. 37 mins.; NR) — BILGE EBIRI