A sober look at Kurdish life

[far...@my-deja.com]

In article <88iv2tsb3ik2ng7t2...@4ax.com>,
Ali <persi...@my-Deja.com> wrote:
> source: LA Times
>
> A sober look at Kurdish life
>
> Thursday, December 7, 2000
>
> "A Time for Drunken Horses," starring Ayoub Ahmadi, Rojin Younessi,
> Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini and Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini. Directed by Bahman
> Ghobadi.
> In Hollywood movies, children appear rarely more than comic
> relief or heartwarming props in poorly written screenplays about
> grown-ups. But international cinema has a long tradition of dramas
> where children are the central players.
> From Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" to the Brazilian street
> saga "Pixote," numerous great films have placed young characters in
> physical harm or in the center of moral predicaments that would tax
> their elders. Unlike Dickens, the classics of neo-realism eschew
> sentimentality and depict children who shoulder their burdens with the
> diligence and respect of the wisest adults.
> Over the past decade, Iran has quietly reinvented the children's
> movie.
> Minimalist, gradually plotted, and gently poetic, films like "The
> White Balloon," "Children of Heaven," "The Apple" and "The Mirror"
> discover sublime narrative inspiration from the simplest premises
> (like a boy's search for his sister's lost shoes, or a girl trying to
> buy a goldfish). They then take the seemingly ordinary and present it
> through the eyes of a child, as if we are looking at the world for the
> first time.
> Bahman Ghobadi's "A Time for Drunken Horses" is the latest
> example of Iranian cinema treating children with mature, complex
> dignity, though, unlike the aforementioned titles, this agonizingly
> authentic movie offers little hope for an area ravaged by extreme
> poverty and political duress.
> Until now, most Iranian children's films have been set in Tehran;
> here, Ghobadi moves the action to Kurdistan, a mountainous, ungoverned
> region spread across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria and populated by 20
> million Kurds.
> His saga revolves around one particularly impoverished family of
> five children who, at the outset of the film, become orphaned. Because
> their uncle can't take care of them (he's got nine children to
> support), financial responsibility falls on Ayoub (Ayoub Ahmadi), a
> hard-working, barely adolescent brother.
> Finding enough money to survive is difficult enough, but Ayoub
> and his siblings face larger problems. Madi (Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini in a
> heartbreaking performance), their older brother, has been crippled
> since birth and his condition is deteriorating; he's a young man stuck
> in the body of a child, living off handfuls of expensive pills and
> medical injections.
> The village doctor tells Ayoub that unless Madi receives an
> operation in Iraq, he'll die. There's a harrowing Catch-22, however:
> Even if Madi gets the operation, he'll probably only live a couple
> more months. Despite the bleak odds, Ayoub decides to try to raise the
> money.
> The only work available in Kurdistan is smuggling goods (tires,
> clothes, food) between borders. The freezing terrain is in a war zone
> so perilous (spontaneous military raids and mine fields are daily
> occupational hazards) that smugglers intoxicate their mules with vodka
> to move them.
> Still, Ayoub has no choice. It's smuggle or nothing. Like the
> horses and mules they always overload, they trudge on, trying not to
> break under their heavy loads.
> As is so often the case in the emerging collection of remarkable
> Iranian films concerning children, of which "A Time for Drunken
> Horses" is one, the actors use their real first names. Aptly, too,
> since they're not actors in the Western sense of the word.
> Part of their unaffected naturalness comes from the fact that
> they're nonprofessionals asked, essentially, to play themselves, or
> play lives so close to the ones they know that the film, although
> fiction, suggests a documentary dimension.
> There's a power and immediacy in this intimately scaled film
> that's all but unknown in what Hollywood studios so fittingly call
> product.
> Ghobadi shot "A Time for Drunken Horses" over two grueling
> winters in Kurdistan, casting local nonactors to fill the roles. The
> near-documentary approach and the gut-wrenching performances all
> recall classic Italian neo-realistic films of the postwar years, with
> the political and personal traumas overlapping in every scene.
> The effect is devastating and often unbearable to watch, but
> Ghobadi's intention isn't to uplift his audience, only to promote
> awareness of the cinematically underrepresented Kurds.
> "A Time for Drunken Horses," one of the few feature films
> focusing on Kurdish life, is brief in duration, but deeper and richer
> in humanity than all but a handful of the American films released this
> year.

The kurdish people are the victims of IRI, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
This is a sad history of what is passeing in kurdistan with kurdish
people who are persecuted & surrounded & killed by the govenments of
their countries.

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[Ali]

IRI killing off Kurds? Site some examples/evidence/sources please.

Ali

[Ali]