Reviews

Bahman Gobadi's intense quasi-documentary A Time for Drunken Horses deals with the lives of a young family of Kurds on the Iran/Iraq border. Their father has died in a landmine incident while smuggling and young Ayoub leaves school in an attempt to feed his siblings and find money for surgery on his crippled brother Madi. Things go from bad to worse: a marriage contract is reneged upon and we last see Ayoub and Madi trudging with a mule drugged against the cold with liquor through the snows of the high border hills as wolves howl in the distance. A few scenes remind us that this poverty is not an accident, but part of a system of actual and cultural oppression: soldiers frisk a group of children and confiscate exercise books; Ayoub spends money on a picture of a Western body-builder for Madi; they and their sisters spend evenings listening to a crackling transistor radio. There is a bracing purity to some of these images of stark suffering which shames much mo! re obviously artistic or popular film-making. On the DVD: A Time for Drunken Horses has trailers but no more elaborate special features. The DVD is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and has simple but effective Dolby Stereo sound. --Roz Kaveney