Half Moon

A Time for Drunken Horses and Turtles Can Fly showed that Bahman Ghobadi thrives on making films under punishing conditions, though if you are Kurdish, these might look like the basic facts of life. Legendary musical patriarch Memo is putting the band back together but facing insuperable difficulties in getting to the gig. He recruits his sons (some of whom need to be persuaded at gunpoint) and sets out for Iraqi Kurdistan to play a concert that will galvanise Kurdish nationalism. As in Marooned in Iraq (AFF03) there is a celebration of the bumbling and argumentative theatre of Kurdish masculinity, but the film grows steadily darker as Memo comes to understand the glimpses of the angel of death vouchsafed to him. This is a defiant celebration in the face of death and despair, moving from an affirmation of the power of creative culture to stand against the stupidity of militarism, to a search for something transcendent in culture that endures beyond death.

The reality of my movie is earthshaking, huge, sad. I didn't want to show all of that directly; I felt that would be bad for the audience and too much for them to bear. I wanted to present this hard reality more smoothly.

Bahman Ghobadi