dir: Bahman Ghobadi, Iran, 2006, 109 mins, Kurdish with subtitles
Cast: Ishmail Ghaffari, Allah Morad Rashtiani, Hedye Tehrani, Golshifteh Farahani
Review by Laurie Munslow
Against the stark backdrop of Iranian Kurdistan, Half Moon offers up a cast of elderly characters that provide colour and humour to an unusual road movie.
Following the fall of Saddam Hussein, a group of aging musicians – lead by Mamo (Ghaffari), a famous Kurdish composer – gain permission to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan to perform in a concert. On the way they must pick up Mamo's ten musical, but unenthusiastic, sons. Despite their reluctance – and the ominous prophecy that he will meet with tragedy on the day of the half moon – Mamo is determined to return to his homeland after 37 years in the wilderness. So determined is he, in fact, that he even shoots one of his runaway sons in the ear to prevent his escape.
However, the central “celestial voice” of his opus, Hesho (Tehrani), is an exiled woman living in a remote city with 1333 other banished singers: under Iranian Islamic law, women are prohibited from singing in public. The group's arrival to collect her is probably one of the most memorable scenes of the film. With what sounds like one voice, the colourfully-dressed women gather to sing for their amazed visitors and bid farewell to Hesho.
While the boundaries between life and death are continually blurred throughout the film, the frontier between Iran and Iraq is not so easily traversed. American's on the Iraqi side of the border shoot anything that moves, and one scene shows Iraqis risking their lives to carry away their deceased. Meanwhile, Hesho is forced to hide from border police under the floorboards of their borrowed bus in a space little bigger than a coffin. Finally, Iranian border police break the musicians' elaborate Kurdish instruments in their successful bid to find the missing Hesho.
But it's not all drama – there are also moments of hilarity. Mobile phone ringtones of cockerel noises sound at the most inopportune of moments, while Mamo's son's wounded ear earns him the nickname Van Gogh: “What happened to your ear?” asks one border policeman. “It got bitten,” replies Van Gogh, “family problem!”
And despite their rugged surroundings, wireless broadband seems to be easily accessible from their laptop, enabling the elderly men to send e-mails on their Yahoo accounts and access Google maps. It's a curious mix of Kurdish traditions, Iranian repression and the influence of the West.
There are other moments of heart-warming humour too, particularly from Mamo's biggest fan, Kako (Rashtiani), the driver of their bus. Insistent that he bring his orphaned cockerel along on the journey – the cockerel's parents were killed at the organised cockfights over which he presides – he attracts the attention of a border policeman concerned about bird flu: “I could get the flu but him, never,” says Kako, “he's hygiene itself!” “Well,” responds the border policeman, “clean under hygiene's feet!”
What is most fascinating about the film is the relation between life and death. Mamo's entrance to the film sees him lying in an open grave, looking at the sky, while his exit sees him clambering into a coffin to die. And it is only in a coffin that Mamo finally crosses the border, having met an angelic woman – with two names, Half Moon and Butterfly – who promises to sing for him in place of Hesho. Death, then, allows him to return to his homeland, suggesting that borders are merely physical boundaries.
And Kurdish music seems to transcend boundaries too. Towards the end of the film, the funeral of one of Mamo's friends is unexpectedly interrupted when the dearly departed apparently moves to the sound of a woman singing. It is as though death is not the end for the Kurdish people.
Perhaps for Mamo though, musical freedom, and the female singing voice, will ultimately lead the way to freedom for Kurdistan and its people: “For all these years they've stopped my singing,” says Mamo. “But this time I won't let them.”
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