Iran has been in the news a lot lately, and generally not for its arts. While political and religious debates seem to overwhelm all other depictions of Iran, the country sits on a treasure trove of rich history and culture, and is one of the oldest continuous civilisations in the world.
We all have our preconceptions about life in one of the world’s most talked about countries, and savvy Iranian artists are picking up on this. A recent photo exhibition in Berlin by young female Iranian photographers attracted huge media attention, and attempted to turn our western views on their heads.
But have you ever seen a film by an Iranian director? To be precise, Bahman Ghobadi is an award-winning Kurdish Iranian director, with such successes as Turtles can Fly and A Time for Drunken Horses on his CV. Half Moon is his third feature film, and like his previous work it looks at the underlying hope and humour of everyday life that exists despite the horrors of life in a dangerous war zone.
Half Moon follows the celebrated Mamo, an elderly Kurdish musician, who has, after many years of pleading, been given permission to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan to perform a concert for the first time in 30 years. He recruits the help of his bus driver friend, played to comic perfection by Allah Morad Rashtiani, to take him and collect his ten musician sons at various points on the long drive.
And so begins something of a reinvention of the band road trip movie genre, in perilous conditions, with aged performers, and Kurdish music. Accompanied by a cockerel on the dashboard of an ancient bus, harassed by border checkpoints and corrupt police, and plagued by visions of his own death, Mamo’s journey takes a different direction to the one he had imagined.
Bleak but stunning mountain landscapes are interrupted by the gunfire of US forces, and as the film races to its ambiguous ending we are in the snowy borderlands of Iran, Turkey and Iraq.
For a film about musicians we hear surprisingly little of their music. But what we are privy to is the eerily beautiful singing of several women, who Mamo seeks out on the journey as the missing link in his quest for the perfect performance. Women are forbidden from singing in front of men in public, so the journey is further complicated.
Ghobadi often uses untrained actors, and has fought hard to make his films in often difficult environments. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Ghobadi said “Nobody ever gave me permission to make a film in Kurdish. Slowly, and with many smiles, I was able to make the first Kurdish-language movie in the history of world cinema”.
Ghobadi’s Half Moon is illuminating and sad, but at times very funny. The script is not as slick as it could be, but the cinematography is wonderful, and the passion behind its creation shines through.
Shot mainly in Iranian Kurdistan the film is part of the New Crowned Hope series, a collaboration between Austria, Iran, Iraq and France. According to the Tehran Times, although Half Moon has been chosen to represent Iraqi cinema at the 2007 Academy Awards, its reception has not been completely straightforward, as it has so far failed to gain a license to screen in Iran.
See it for the sheer pleasure, for an insight into a land you can’t really be a tourist in, and to understand how little people can have, and yet how hard they can fight for their culture and hope for better times.
Half Moon shows at the ICA, in London, until 30 January 2008.