A Time for Drunken Horses

A Time for Drunken Horses

Written, Directed & Produced by: Bahman Ghobadi

Camera d'Or at Cannes Film Festival 2000

Available on Mubi.

This film is about three orphaned Iranian Kurdish children: Amaneh (14), Ayoub (12) and Madi (15) and their struggles for livelihood. Madi is severely handicapped and he needs a surgery, which will let him live for just a few months more. What Amaneh and Ayoub go through for bare existence is heartbreaking to watch. The visual irony of this film is that, the location which the film is set in looks like a perfect location for an exotic Bollywood song and in reality the livelihood there is so messed up. This film reminded me of Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven and Nadine Labaki's Capernaum where the protagonists were children, I don't know how they manage to get these performances out of children. Hirokazu Kore-Eda's films still deal with children in situations where they don't have to do much, but in Iranian cinema the kids have to take the roles of adults and do things which even adults would find difficult to. Ayoub joins the adults who smuggle truck tires to Iraq through mules and the conditions are so bad that the mules are fed alcohol to keep going. The imagery in this film is strong because of its depiction of the socio-cultural milieu in a brutally honest way. 

The film has a realist approach to all crafts, everything is conceived in a documentary style. The film has its vision inspired from Italian Neorealism, just that here the struggles are even more intense. Ayoub slaps Amaneh in a scene and she gets upset over it, when Ayoub apologizes twice she is alright about it and gets back to being friends with him. This scene is conceived and performed in a way, where it almost tells us everything we need to know about the world of the characters; about their lives, about their love for each other, about their mentalities, humanity, etc. This is Bahman Ghobadi's debut and he shot it in his own village. Many debut films of film makers have this quality where they express themselves the strongest, maybe because they aren't sure if they'll get to make more films in the future. But whether it's Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Jean Luc Godard's Breathless and many other indie film makers who had strong debuts; all these films are drawn to a certain extent from their own lives which adds to the individualistic nature of these films. Roger Ebert mentioned in his review that even if Bahman Ghobadi didn't intend to do so, this film speaks about the need of rights of ethnic minorities in Iran and everywhere.