A time for drunken horses

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

The first feature in a Kurdish language, which won the Camera d'Or (best first film award) at Cannes in 2000, stands proudly in Iran's short but noble tradition of documentary-style features like The Key and The Jar which use non-actors to tell barely fictional stories.

But it comes with the warning that it's often disturbingly hard to watch.

Its central characters are a family of Kurdish orphans who eke out a living working for smugglers across the snowclad mountainous border with Iraq. Beasts of burden like the mules whose owners inure them against the cold by lacing their drinking water with firewater (hence the title), they face blizzards, bandits, corrupt border guards and cheating employers as they struggle to afford luxuries such as food and exercise books.

Much of their energy is spent raising money for medicine for a grotesquely handicapped sibling who looks like a toddler and needs an operation to prolong his pitiable life by a few months and it's heartrending to watch them thrust by tragedy into early adulthood - the barely adolescent eldest daughter enters into an arranged marriage to raise money and when 12-year-old Ayoub (Ahmadi), the de facto father, stands helpless in the face of disaster it's almost impossible to bear.

Ghobadi tells his story without a trace of sentimentalism and in the process loads it with a terrifying moral weight. He is clearly a filmmaker of great vision with a powerful command of grim irony: he shows the dwarfish Madi sitting entranced before a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger and has the earthbound children read stories about the invention of flight.

Viewers who look for end-credit reassurance that no animals suffered will find plenty of evidence to the contrary and the ending eschews the comforting pieties which might offer the viewer a consoling resolution. In the final analysis, it's most powerful because we know it's so close to true; that it's a small masterpiece is almost incidental.

Cast: Ayoub Ahmadi, Rojin Younessi, Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini, Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini

Director: Bahman Ghobadi

Rating: M

Running time: 77 mins

Screening: Lido