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If you're reading
this, it's a sure bet that you're one of the lucky ones, that you live the
best kind of life human civilization has to offer. We are busy and
comfortable -- we shop in overflowing supermarkets and are presented with
endless opportunities for entertainment, and our biggest worries are the
turnings of the stock market. It's easy for us to forget that billions of
people on this planet still live at subsistence level, have never used a
telephone, and see the women around them regularly die in childbirth. Oh,
we all probably had our mothers implore us to think of all the children
starving in China or Africa who'd love to have those brussels sprouts, but
those harsh and brutal lives aren't really anything we think about...
until we're face to face with the reality of those lives, as we are in the
startling and heartbreaking A TIME FOR DRUNKEN
HORSES.
Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurdish filmmaker -- the only
Kurdish filmmaker -- whose short films have been set among his people, a
disenfranchised ethnic minority in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. HORSES, his first feature film, is fictional, but the
characters and events are based in fact. Ghobadi hopes to promote
awareness of his cultural heritage and the lives of his people, and he
succeeds stunningly -- this is a haunting film, performed by an
extraordinary nonprofessional cast, about hardscrabble life at the
outermost fringes of civilization.
The snowy, mountainous Iranian border with Iraq is a desolate
place. Living conditions are barely more than medieval, yet Kurdish
villages cling to a kind of life, enduring by smuggling goods back and
forth across the border. Ayoub (Ayoub Ahmadi), all of perhaps 13, is the
man of his family. His mother is dead, his smuggler father is far away,
and the eldest brother, Madi (Mehdi Ekhtiar-dini) is handicapped, mentally
and physically -- retarded, with tiny, bent legs and a stunted body, Madi
is like a toddler in both size and mind. So Ayoub, and sometimes little
sister Ameneh (Ameneh Ekhtiar-dini), scurry for odd jobs in a nearby small
town while eldest sister Rojin (Rojin Younessi) watches after the baby.
They are surviving, but only just. But when the local doctor tells Ayoub
that Madi, whose condition will kill him soon, needs an operation to
extend his life a few months, Ayoub is determined to earn the money for
the surgery. He begins working with the local smugglers, borrowing his
uncle's mule to ferry goods over the mountains into Iraq.
The film's title is not metaphoric: The smugglers feed their
mules alcohol to keep them warm in the wintry weather and tractable when
distant gunshots herald ambushes by pirates. Mule stubbornness seems more
like mule common sense -- only an idiot would deliberately risk walking in
ambushes as the smugglers do, and ask their pack animals to do -- though
their masters' only excuse for such behavior is a good one. Smuggling is
all they have, no matter the dangers it entails, and Ayoub's story ends on
a realistically somber note: This is all he will ever have. His life will
be spent willingly walking across literal and figurative minefields for
lack of another choice.
Frequently using a handheld camera to lend a documentary air to
the film, Ghobadi unsentimentally show us these hardbitten, world-weary
kids who are children in age only, yet he doesn't ask for pity. Though
their face are sad and too grown-up, they are quite happy when they sing
"Life is aging me / Bringing me closer to death." And they are not hard
with one another: Ayoub and his siblings are extremely close, and it is
their love for one another that ultimately tears them apart. Madi is
treated with brusque kindness by their entire village, and, poignantly, he
owns the single cheery piece of clothing the family seems to own: a bright
yellow rain slicker. It may be poor protection from the cold, but the same
can be said for everyone's wardrobe, which isn't nearly as colorful as
Madi's jacket.
Still, the moments that haunt me the most are the reminders that
Ayoub and Madi and their family live in the same world that you and I do,
though it may not seem that way to any of us. In school the younger
children read about "gigantic airplanes" that fly people around the globe.
Such things must seem like a fantasy far removed from their reality.
Discomfortingly, it's not so easy for us to dismiss their realm as
fantasy.