A Time for Drunken Horses

This film is about the lose of childhood, a similar theme that is very common among many other Kurdish films, including Karzan Kardozi's I Want to Live (2015), and Yilmaz Gunye's The Wall (1983). These three films reflect the reality of the Kurdish people living under oppression in countries of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.

As can be determined by the almost unbelievably coarse

and heartless "reviews" of A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES seen here on the IMDB's "external reviews," the

Shooting Gallery had quite a task on their hands in selling

Americans on an Iranian film about a Kurdish brother and

sister smuggling contraband on mules to pay for their crippled sibling's life-saving operation. The tony, elderly

Westwood audience I saw HORSES with seemed put out that such an unpleasant experience interrupted their usual

flow of Landmark Cinema Cultural Time-Outs; those with

stronger constitutions will be offered as compensation

images that will stay seared in your heart for the rest of your

life.

A scene in the snow, in which an extended family decides

the fate of the dwarfish younger brother, has an operatic

severity that suggests a closer approximation of the dramatic quality of the Old Testament than any movie based on the Bible. The ending is so amazingly courageous one cannot imagine a brace of dentist-investors, much less an American studio, standing

for its effrontery.

The Iranian cinema is not just reinventing the experience of

movies; it is rediscovering the moral dimension of telling

stories.

With their mother long dead, twelve-year old Ayoub becomes the head of the family over his four brothers and sisters. Taking up the dangerous smuggling runs of his father, Ayoub is put in an even more difficult situation when he learns that his youngest brother, the severely handicapped Madi is getting steadily worse and will need an operation to live any longer than the next few months. With the dangers involved, Ayoub sets out to make the journey and the money to get Mani the operation he needs.

I had never heard of this film before I watched it, nor had I heard anything about it – I just was interested to see an Iranian film (my first I think). Despite having now read the many comments on this site about the film, I must confess that I was not as taken by it as everyone else seems to have been. What it does well is to present us with quite a convincing view of the general hardships and lifestyles of those living in this area and, as such it is pretty interesting. However when you take a look at the plot, it doesn't actually fit with the film's aim of realism. Firstly not a great deal happens and the film is not as consistently involving as it really should have been – even as a documentary style film it has several points where it drags quite heavily. The actual subject of the film rather undermines the reality of the situation, even if it is used to emotionally involve the audience easier than a straight documentary may have done.

What I mean by this is the plot device of Madi – in the Western world I can accept a story where others will really put themselves out for others fianically; however in this situation I found it to be unconvincing that Ayoub would risk the immediate future of the rest of his family for the sake of Madi who, lets be honest, was never going to live for very long even with the operation. If he was my brother I would do anything, but I didn't buy that they would be able to spend the money knowing that they would save Madi but maybe condemn the whole lot of them to starvation etc. It did make me more emotionally involved in the film but I have to wonder how much more involving it would have been if Madi's suffering would have been just yet another unchangeable part of this family's situation.

The cast are pretty good considering the fact that none of them are actors and, in contrast to many Western movies, it is the children who are vastly superior to the adults. While many of the grownups seem uncomfortable in front of the camera and only act natural when in crowds, the children are best in the smaller moments. In particular Ahmadi's Ayoub is a very sympathetic character and is a good way to get into the story; likewise it is very difficult not to get emotionally involved when you see Ekhtiar-dini crying and crying over just one of his daily injections. However out of the rest of the cast there isn't enough material to go around and too few of the ensemble cast have much to do but hang around and look deprived! The direction is great and manages to blend the beauty of the scenery with the desolation of the lives to good effect – that sounds a bit pompous but I can't describe it any other way!

This is a slow film that doesn't have the plot that it deserved and it may alienate the casual viewer but it is still worth the effort. The acting of the main children is very convincing, the direction captures the beauty of Iran as well as the sheer grind of the characters' lives and the film is mostly interesting. Only weaknesses in plotting stop it from being better.

I wasn't sure where this movie was going for the first 15 minutes, but before long I was drawn into the story like the rest of the audience. This could be considered in the "Indy" film class, but whatever rough edges it might have only add to the impact of the story. Reason tells me it was fiction, but I really had the feeling we were there, or at least that one of the characters was filming the whole thing with a handicam.

The filmmaker did what he set out to do: He make a film that makes us care about some of his people. The conditions these people struggle under are appalling, and are made all the more difficult by politics. My girlfriend and I left the theatre wondering where we could find out more about these people and what can be done for them.

The young actors, especially Madi, are as good as - and perhaps better than - any $20 million Hollywood superstar. This is Film, not a Hollywood formula flick, and the story is worth seeing, however bleak it may seem at times.

"Time of Drunken Horses" is an uncompromising film about love and perseverance. It closely resembles the Iranian film, "Color of Paradise", and the Chinese "Not One Less" in its simplicity and its unrelenting message as well as using skilled child and adult actors in real-life settings. Filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi reminds us up front that we in the West don't understand the plight of the Kurdish refugees, numbering 20 million in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. "Time of Drunken Horses" is both an important lesson as well as a powerful homage to the suffering Kurdish people. To its credit, the film does depict the suffering as sympathy but rather as heroic and noble. When children have to fight for work in the marketplace, usually carrying heavy contraband on their backs, or when they have to trudge through deep snow to return to their village, or when they sing childhood songs about how they are aging so fast, there is a surprising energy and enthusiasm. The film takes its viewpoint from three children - a teenage boy, Ayoub, placed in charge of a disintegrating family, his younger sister, Amaneh, and the crippled and sick brother, Madi. The father has died in a landmine accident and the step-mother is away leaving the children in the hands of an already burdened uncle with eight children of his own. Madi needs an operation to extend his life another 7 or 8 months; otherwise, he will died soon. The love extended to this midget child is remarkable from the brother and sisters (one even accepts marriage in exchange for obtaining the needed operation) to the kindly doctor who comes regularly to give injections. That is the one irony that this film plainly wants to get across. We are blest with modern medicine is at our fingertips and yet we can decide to withhold care if it appears to be futile. How, then, can we understand, in a society in which there is so little, the determination of one boy to extend the live of someone he truly loves when the odds are overwhelmingly against him. The final scene merely strengthens the powerful message of "Time of Drunken Horses" as the boy and his crippled brother valiantly march off in the snow to a future we know will not be pleasant.