Palaest recommended

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Mabel Munoz Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Kurdish Film Review This is a Kurdish film. That does not just mean that it is a film in the Kurdish language or one set in Kurdistan, it also means that it is Kurdish by genre. Children or orphans, child labor, war or the result of a war, missing or sick persons, remote area, difficult terrain, smuggling, poverty... If you think you've seen this before, you probably have, in another film.This is not the fault of this film, as it is one of the earliest ones, but when everyone (including this director) started reusing these themes, this film didn't age well. There are just too many films about the same topics, ones that don't go too deep into the issues beyond presenting them to the audience.This film is a snapshot in the life of some children who try to save their sick sibling.The children have to become adults much earlier than they should, needing to quit school, be responsible, get married or work at an age when they should be children. This film is shot in a cinéma verité style, almost like a Handicam documentary and you really feel like you are there.Some have commented on the acting, feeling that it is unprofessional, while others said that it was very convincing because the actors weren't really acting. I'm siding with the latter, even though I think both sides are describing the same thing. Some people expect to see acting and are unconvinced by people being or playing themselves. I have several problems with this film. For one, as a story, it lacks an ending. It's not ambiguous, it's just abrupt. The film doesn't end, it just stops.Secondly, this film also doesn't go deeper into the issues. It presents them as a list of problems Kurds have to endure, but it just goes from one item to the next, offering no cause, commentary or solution.For example, the director, Ghobadi, could've shown how circle is perpetuated. Children have to choose between working to survive or going to school. This leaves the population uneducated, able only to do menial work, live in poverty and struggle to take care of their own children, who themselves have to choose between working to help their parents and siblings or go to school.The director could've shown another angle, how war, poverty and lack of health care have changed the shape of the family in some parts of Kurdistan where the new nuclear family is the siblings alone taking care of each other.He could've shown us how the suffering of these children is the fault of their parents who decided to have these children at a terrible time, after the destructive Iran-Iraq war and during the first Gulf War. These children were born as Kurds at a time when Iran and Iraq hated each other, with Kurds in the middle and everyone under embargo.Ghobadi could've shown us the cause, shown us how this is perpetuated or shown us a solution or a glimmer of hope.You begin to ask questions. Why did the father not marry again to have a stepmother for these children? After decades of war and genocide, the population of Kurdistan is unbalanced, with so many widows and unmarried women. Marriage in such difficult times is not about love, weddings or childbearing, but about economics and survival. This man could not find one widow to help raise his children? That is hard to believe.In real life, broken systems bring broken and imperfect solutions. The broken solution to child poverty is child labor. The solution to lack of jobs is the grey/black markets. The solution to losing a wife is to find one's children a stepmother. The director has deliberately cut out that option to give us a story that is sadder. Between realism and sadness, the director opted for the latter. The solution to childlessness is adoption. But that is cut out too.These are failings in this film. The director chose to give us something that would sell better because it's sadder rather than something more realistic.Finally, even as I give this film 7/10, I wonder what the point of this film is. As a movie, it's not that entertaining. As a documentary-like film, it's not that realistic, aiming clearly to deliver the saddest story possible, almost following a checklist (orphan siblings of a sick child have to engage in child labor and sell their sister as a child bride to pay for their brother's life-saving surgery. Is that not contrived?). It's not a documentary, so it does not propose solutions, give us causes or a deeper look. So what does this film do? It is, in a way, misery snuff, meant to elicit a sad response from the viewer. It does that job well with incredible focus, but at the cost of overall film quality.There is little focus on Kurdish culture, while Kurdish music, perhaps the most important thing in Kurdish society, plays almost no part. This is due to the filming style - adding a cinematic score would've clashed with the look the director was aiming for.I called this film the quintessential Kurdish film because more and more films follow this template -  produced in 2000, Kurdish cinema has still not advanced one inch. We get to choose between tragedies and fairy tales. This one is a tragedy, Bekas a fairy tale. My criticism is harsh for a film I give 7, because it has to be. Giving this film 10/10 does no one any favor.Positives: acting, cinematography, realism (somewhat), casting, location Negatives: lack of story, ending, depth, message; lack of music/score.

Roedy Green This is a seriously depressing movie. I had to stop the film half a dozen times and do something else, because it was so grim. The family loses mother, then father than oldest daughter. Oldest son Ayoub (maybe 14) tries to carry on looking after the family. Others do their best to help, but everyone is so poor there is not much anyone can do. Everyone has to work so hard for so little wage. On top of this they have a crippled brother, Madi, who can barely walk, and is only about half normal height. He needs an operation, but even if he gets it he will die in a year. Soldiers attack. Employers refuse to pay. Rescuers renege. The whole film gives a feeling of impending doom to innocents. Then suddenly the movie ends without resolving anything, as though the ending had been trimmed off. Some exotic script flows by for a minute, without subtitles. Perhaps that explains what happens.Often in movies when terrible things happen to people, I don't care. I have developed no connection with the characters or I don't like them. In this movie, I cared so much about the characters it hurt. It grabs your emotions, but without the usual corny tricks.There is a scene with animal cruelty I do not think was simulated where they slapped and kicked mules. The whipping I think was simulated.The hardship is not supernatural or overstated. It feels like a realistic portrayal of being a child truck tire smuggler in Iran-Iraq.This is not an enjoyable movie, but it is a good movie.

katydid4819 First off, A Time For Drunken Horses is a movie that I enjoyed, but I would not call it a good movie. Shot in the documentary style, it feels more like a documentary than a fictionalized film. It portrays the hardships of the Kurdish people and one family as they try to survive in a world that the American viewers have no concept of. A film generally does tell of hardships such as these but the difference between A Time For Drunken Horses and other films is that the others create a story that makes its subject matter more understandable. That's the point of a story; to explain things we can't know otherwise.Directed by Bahman Ghobadi, the shots are set up with expertise and the snowy landscapes are very impressive. Visually, this film is a masterpiece with its style and cinematography. Ghodabi's actors, all amateurs, don't display the same raw talent as their director but will suffice and must be forgiven, as they are only amateurs playing themselves. Perhaps the subtitles make it harder to gauge their abilities but no matter what, their facial expressions don't amount to enough to garner the emotions that the scene requires.Emotions, though, are not in short supply. This situations here become so extreme and never redeeming that it is hard not to view the whole film as a ploy to garner cheap tears from its viewers. It's analogous to American directors who add unnecessary nudity to their films just to get the few extra dollars from the demographic that pays just to see Angelina Jolie naked, not caring what the movie is actually about. There comes a point in A Time For Drunken Horses that you have to ask what the point is. Yes, this is educational for those of us who don't live like this but what about those that do? Imagine this: a car wreck, a bad one with blood, death, and visible pain. That is what this movie is similar to. An event that you see every day but don't directly relate to. It's horrible and you know it, so why watch a movie about it. Would you want to watch a car wreck happen for eighty minutes? Where's the redemption? There is nothing to be gained from watching this. There's nothing that Ghodadi says with his film that the evening news doesn't. I see hundreds of films a year. I find that people often feel required to say that they enjoyed a foreign film. Perhaps they don't want to seem ignorant about what they are watching. For example, in Ebert's review he accuses those who don't like this movie of lacking in empathy. A well made foreign film has a great chance to make it to the American film market but that doesn't mean that it is a good movie. Just because a book is grammatically correct and follows the required structure to a T does not mean it is enjoyable. It's all about content and the conviction the writer has in what they are saying. With A Time For Drunken Horses, I felt more like I was watching an educational piece the History Channel had produced more than a story someone had put their blood and tears into. I would say it is a good movie but I probably would not recommend this. I think A Time For Drunken Horses has more political message than heartbreaking conviction. **/*****

Spleen Neorealism can never be GREAT cinema - but then, directors like Ghobadi, at their best, aren't primarily interested in creating great cinema. They want to show us other people's lives. It's worthwhile when it succeeds, and it succeeds here. There's a bracing purity of purpose: clean, fresh images (the hand-held camera work getting in the way only once) of real people. But something gets in the way...Ayoub's three-year-old brother Madi needs an operation within four weeks. Without it he will die. With it, he will live for at most eight months, and then die anyway. He cannot be cured.THAT'S what drives Ayoub - and I wish it had been something else. I wish it hadn't been impressed so heavily upon us that the POINT of this dangerous crossing and re-crossing of the Iran/Iraq border is to save Madi's life. It's a flimsy point. Madi can't be leading a happy life (he's deformed, he requires constant medication, he looks like he's suffering - indeed, Ayoub says at one point that Madi was "in pain all night"), and there's no chance, NO chance, that Madi will reach adulthood, or even the age of five. To be blunt: the operation isn't worth the money it will cost to perform.Of course, man's (or boy's) quest is his own. If Ayoub wants to pursue this particular quixotic project, good luck to him. But it doesn't make much emotional sense to me. We never see what Madi means to Ayoub. We know that Madi isn't all Ayoub has left in the world: he has two sisters, and even if the elder one is to be married off by their uncle and never heard from again, Ayoub clearly also loves his youngest sister - and he doesn't seem to have lost hope in himself. Deciding to sacrifice so much to briefly prolong the painful life of someone he knows to be doomed anyway, strikes me as unworthy of him. No doubt many people will think that he MUST do so, because any human life is always worth more than any amount of money, etc. But it's rich people who think like this. Deep down even they know it isn't really true. The money Ayoub plans to spend on Madi's operation could easily turn out to have been the only thing that could have saved him or his sister from starvation. Or slavery.In short, and for other reasons as well, the film would have been improved and in fact offered a BETTER illustration of what the Kurdish people are up against if Madi and everything associated with him had simply been excised from the story. The overall pattern of events could easily have been exactly the same, couldn't it? Only it would have meant more.