A long time ago I caught Bahman Ghobadi A Time for Drunken Horses, easily one of the most miserable films I have ever seen. Not only were the characters orphaned Kurdish kids (that is, orphans within a society itself orphaned and oppressed by surrounding territories), one of them was a deformed dwarf. Something must have changed since then. I missed the intervening films, but Ghobadi Half Moon is not just stranger than most Iranian films dare to be, it is outright bizarre by any standard.
A group of Kurdish musicians set out to perform in newly liberated Kurdish Iraq, having labored for seven months to get the permit. Things predictably go from optimism to worst-case scenario in record time, but for very odd reasons. Lead musician Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari) makes a pit stop along the way to collect his female vocalist Hesho (Hedieh Tehrani). She is no ordinary singer, though, but one of female singers exiled to a city on territory forbidden to civilians where the women apparently spend all day singing in voices which sound like one human singing. Forget even the sheer impossibility of this scenario; the sight of the women standing in what looks like an ancient Mesopotamian village and singing together before breaking out into a spontaneous musical number is indelible.
Half Moon is full of similar weird flights of fancy that justify Fellini comparisons, and eventually the dream sequences become practically incomprehensible. Ghobadi can no longer be accused of beating his audience into emotional submission. Half Moon is by turns alternately rich and strange and, occasionally, didactic and/or indecipherable. The results are uneasy but mostly compelling; Ghobadi might yet become important as more than the world token Kurdish auteur.

By Vadim Rizov

Code: NR0015