A (Humble) Champion For Kurdistan

A week ago I talked my wife and our out-of-town guests into an evening at the Harvard Film Archive. The film was A Time For Drunken Horses, and was followed by a Q and A with filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. When it opened in New York, where I was living at the time, Horses ran for a mere two weeks, and I missed it before I'd even read that it was "like a blast of cold, fresh air," or something like that - a goofy notice, sure, but then I let the idea of the film grow in my mind, a masterpiece that got away from me, something to track down later. Then I forgot about it. Then Jamie and I saw Ghobadi's later film Half Moon, and that was so unexpectedly good it got me building the legend of Horses again.

It didn't disappoint. It felt very much like the debut feature it was- less polished than Half Moon, energetic, unfiltered yet uncluttered, and unrestrained in pursuing a simple ambition, to evoke sympathy.

Like Half Moon, Horses is about the importance of family, but Horses is almost unbearably poignant in this respect. The children in this film, who work with smugglers bringing tires into Iraq on horseback, care for and fight for one another in astonishing conditions. Every moment seems to embody the children's struggle to survive- fighting hypothermia, escaping narrowly from the guns of the border guards, or negotiating to get treatment for their disabled, terminally-ill brother, Madi.

The Q and A was long and enlightening. At least half the audience apparently spoke Farsi. Mr. Ghobadi's translator patiently scribbled and summarized his discursive answers, but there was plenty of laughter before she had the chance to deliver each translation. Isn't Cambridge something?

My mind keeps returning to a scene early in the film. Border guards stop a truck carrying at least twenty children; the children, who are forgotten as the truck is confiscated, leap through the snowy wasteland in a single file, clearly with a plan, although I for one wasn't completely sure what it was. That basically sums up what I consider most memorable and unique about Horses: the quantity of moments that feel so natural and effortless, and so outrageous at the same time. It's hard to say whether it would be more amazing to learn that the scene had been staged, or that it hadn't.

I thought of this again when a young man asked Ghobadi if he is influenced by literature, and he replied that a film influenced by a piece of literature, though with its own merits, would be far more contrived that what he aims to create. As he describes it, his method is to write pages of notes, but not a script, and then let the film coalesce naturally from the location; the people who live there become his characters, and their lives, and the situations he encounters, become the story. In fact, one can simply go to Kurdistan and start filming, he said, and one will have a movie. Now I was more unsure than ever whether those children in the snow were acting or not, and then it occurred to me that it didn't even matter- they may have played out the scene one day as actors for Ghobadi, and on another day, lived it.

I think this is the moment when what we call "documentary fiction" finally does its job: the questions of what was staged and what wasn't become irrelevant. It's an unusually powerful kind of investment you experience when you start really accepting everything you see, and I won't be convinced that it didn't require enormous skill and creativity to make a true narrative film that accomplishes this.

Yet Mr. Ghobadi goes out of his way to downplay his own role in this process. The film opens with a full-page letter, from him to the audience, insisting that everything we are about to see is real, and that the characters are "not figments of my imagination," but Kurds he knows who actually live in the manner the film depicts; and after the film, he continued to insist that his own hand as an artist had little to do with what we'd just seen. But he'd made us see a bit of what he sees himself, and in the way that he sees it, which is what most artists are trying to do all the time, and what only good artists can actually do.