‘Drunken Horses’ Illustrates a Kurdish Family’s Struggles

The intriguing title of Kurdish Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s “A Time for Drunken Horses” comes from a practice of Kurds along the rugged Iran-Iraq border. They get their dray animals, mainly mules, inebriated in order to be able to drive them back and forth across the border in severe winter weather as they transport smuggled goods into Iraq.

Ghobadi describes his beautiful, heart-rending film, a co-winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes 2000, as “a humble tribute to my cultural heritage.”

Life is hard for these poverty-stricken Kurds, among the 20 million who live as an ethnic minority in portions of Turkey and Syria as well as Iran and Iraq. It is especially true for an adolescent brother and sister, Ameneh (Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini) and her older brother Ayoub (Ayoub Ahmadi). Like everyone else in their village, they are engaged in smuggling to survive.

Their mother is dead, their father is often absent, and they are the linchpins for their other siblings, in particular their brother Madi (Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini), diminutive, disabled and sickly. Madi can barely walk and is carried most everywhere by either Ayoub or Ameneh.

Worse yet, the smuggling, an operation vulnerable to ambushes, is made horrifically dangerous by myriad land mines. Some villagers cannot even farm their land because it is riddled with mines.

This is a story of tender, loving family ties with the strength of iron; Ayoub and Ameneh are prepared to make any sacrifice to pay for the operation that Madi must have within the month if he is to survive--an operation that will buy him only an additional seven or eight months of life at best.

“A Time for Drunken Horses” is a film of simplicity and power, beautifully shot and effortlessly acted by nonprofessionals. One of the few Iranian films made largely in Kurdish, it is like many other Iranian films in that it reveals and implicitly comments upon hardship, injustice and inequity through the experiences of children.

Shrewdly, Ghobadi ends his film abruptly; what he is celebrating is neither triumph nor defeat but the dogged determination of a people to survive unselfishly despite terrible circumstances not of their own making.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: adult themes and intense situations.

‘A Time for Drunken Horses’

Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini: Ameneh

Ayoub Ahmadi: Ayoub

Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini: Madi

A Shooting Gallery of a Franco-Iranian co-production: MK2 Diffusion International (Paris)/Bahman Ghobadi Films (Iran); made with the cooperation of the Farabi Cinema Foundation. Writer-director-art director-producer Bahman Ghobadi. Cinematographer Sated Nikzat. Editor Samad Tavazoee. Music Hossein Alizadeh. In Kurdish and Farsi, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 19 minutes.

Exclusively at the Beverly Center Cineplex, Beverly Boulevard at La Cienega Boulevard, (310) 777-FILM (No. 172) or (310) 652-7760.