Set in a mountain village in Kurdish Iran (the very village where Ghobadi was born, it turns out), near the border of Iraq, the drama follows the harrowing existence of the villagers--and a family of orphaned children in particular--carving out a subsistence living smuggling goods over the border. It's not simply back-breaking, spirit-crushing work; they face the threat of death from mines and thieves, or confiscation of goods by the government forces. The film's title refers to the overworked pack animals, which are plied with vodka to keep them going through the cold (the snow drifts at times come to knees of the horses) and hardships. The humans themselves are beasts of burden in their own right, but without the numbing effects of alcohol. That Ghobadi focuses on the ordeal of a 12-year-old boy who signs on as an apprentice to the veteran smugglers makes the experience all the more dire.
Ayoub, an adolescent growing up fast (father and mother are both dead and his eldest sister Rojine plays at den mother to their younger siblings while he's the breadwinner), takes the job to raise money for an operation for his crippled older brother Madi, a tiny boy in an awkward, misshapen dwarf body who will die within a couple of weeks without the procedure (which will only give him a few more months at that). Not much hope here, but Ghobadi fills these scenes with the affection they have for one another and his compassion warms the film for a few brief moments.
Ghobadi apprenticed under Abbas Kiarostami, the most internationally famous of Iran's master class, and he appropriates many of the narrative conventions that Kiarostami and Mohsen Mahkmalbaf settled into to make meaningful films within the restrictive limitations imposed by the government on the cinematic representation of adult subjects and themes. Yet Ghobadi's sensibility owes more neo-realist melodrama mixed with a kind of polished version of documentary immediacy than the Iranian master's gently profound stories and poetic style. Though he uses the experience of children as his entry into the hard lives of these people on the outskirts of civilization, he's more confrontational, his portrait of the poverty and violence of their existence raw and unmediated by metaphor, and narratively direct, with a story that takes us from one dramatic crisis and disappointment to another.
In many ways it is more conventional and literal than Kiarostami's work, a hard yet visually beautiful portrait of grueling third world lives under the desperation of poverty and the terror of war. Where Ghobadi's later films add an element of humor to the drama, this is simply grim: bold, vivid and arresting, to be sure, but bleak. But this is also elevated by excellent performances he draws from the undeniably photogenic children--he gets these non-actors, cast right out of the village, to behave like kids on camera and there seems no acting is going on--astounding locations, vivid photography and a harrowing climax that delivers the adrenaline-rush drama of an action thriller in a style consistent with immediacy and intimacy of the boy's experience. It is an accomplished and compelling debut.
Kino's DVD release presents the film in the familiar European aspect ratios of 1.66:1 (though the disc lists it at 1.85:1). The image is perfectly watchable and the film has a rough, austere beauty but the transfer appears to be ported over from a European Pal master adjusted for NTSC. The image is soft and shows excessive video grain that is apparent on large monitors. In Kurdish with clean, white English subtitles. No supplements.
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by Sean Axmaker
