GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Kurdish Film Review This is a Kurdish film. That does not just mean that it is a film in the Kurdish language or one set in Kurdistan, it also means that it is Kurdish by genre. Children or orphans, child labor, war or the result of a war, missing or sick persons, remote area, difficult terrain, smuggling, poverty... If you think you've seen this before, you probably have, in another film.This is not the fault of this film, as it is one of the earliest ones, but when everyone (including this director) started reusing these themes, this film didn't age well. There are just too many films about the same topics, ones that don't go too deep into the issues beyond presenting them to the audience.This film is a snapshot in the life of some children who try to save their sick sibling.The children have to become adults much earlier than they should, needing to quit school, be responsible, get married or work at an age when they should be children. This film is shot in a cinéma verité style, almost like a Handicam documentary and you really feel like you are there.Some have commented on the acting, feeling that it is unprofessional, while others said that it was very convincing because the actors weren't really acting. I'm siding with the latter, even though I think both sides are describing the same thing. Some people expect to see acting and are unconvinced by people being or playing themselves. I have several problems with this film. For one, as a story, it lacks an ending. It's not ambiguous, it's just abrupt. The film doesn't end, it just stops.Secondly, this film also doesn't go deeper into the issues. It presents them as a list of problems Kurds have to endure, but it just goes from one item to the next, offering no cause, commentary or solution.For example, the director, Ghobadi, could've shown how circle is perpetuated. Children have to choose between working to survive or going to school. This leaves the population uneducated, able only to do menial work, live in poverty and struggle to take care of their own children, who themselves have to choose between working to help their parents and siblings or go to school.The director could've shown another angle, how war, poverty and lack of health care have changed the shape of the family in some parts of Kurdistan where the new nuclear family is the siblings alone taking care of each other.He could've shown us how the suffering of these children is the fault of their parents who decided to have these children at a terrible time, after the destructive Iran-Iraq war and during the first Gulf War. These children were born as Kurds at a time when Iran and Iraq hated each other, with Kurds in the middle and everyone under embargo.Ghobadi could've shown us the cause, shown us how this is perpetuated or shown us a solution or a glimmer of hope.You begin to ask questions. Why did the father not marry again to have a stepmother for these children? After decades of war and genocide, the population of Kurdistan is unbalanced, with so many widows and unmarried women. Marriage in such difficult times is not about love, weddings or childbearing, but about economics and survival. This man could not find one widow to help raise his children? That is hard to believe.In real life, broken systems bring broken and imperfect solutions. The broken solution to child poverty is child labor. The solution to lack of jobs is the grey/black markets. The solution to losing a wife is to find one's children a stepmother. The director has deliberately cut out that option to give us a story that is sadder. Between realism and sadness, the director opted for the latter. The solution to childlessness is adoption. But that is cut out too.These are failings in this film. The director chose to give us something that would sell better because it's sadder rather than something more realistic.Finally, even as I give this film 7/10, I wonder what the point of this film is. As a movie, it's not that entertaining. As a documentary-like film, it's not that realistic, aiming clearly to deliver the saddest story possible, almost following a checklist (orphan siblings of a sick child have to engage in child labor and sell their sister as a child bride to pay for their brother's life-saving surgery. Is that not contrived?). It's not a documentary, so it does not propose solutions, give us causes or a deeper look. So what does this film do? It is, in a way, misery snuff, meant to elicit a sad response from the viewer. It does that job well with incredible focus, but at the cost of overall film quality.There is little focus on Kurdish culture, while Kurdish music, perhaps the most important thing in Kurdish society, plays almost no part. This is due to the filming style - adding a cinematic score would've clashed with the look the director was aiming for.I called this film the quintessential Kurdish film because more and more films follow this template -  produced in 2000, Kurdish cinema has still not advanced one inch. We get to choose between tragedies and fairy tales. This one is a tragedy, Bekas a fairy tale. My criticism is harsh for a film I give 7, because it has to be. Giving this film 10/10 does no one any favor.Positives: acting, cinematography, realism (somewhat), casting, location Negatives: lack of story, ending, depth, message; lack of music/score.

Tim Kidner When your own, Western, cosseted and safe children start moaning about not having the latest 'must-have', play them this. They'll soon shut up, I promise!From the moment I first watched this enigmatically titled film on TV many years ago, I knew it was to become an absolute favourite of mine. Now, at last, I've got it on DVD and can watch it again (& again).There's something very resolutely matter-of-fact in these people's harshness and the extents to which they have to go to address them. It seems ironic - and a bit ridiculous here in the West, where we like a a drink or two, that liquor is not drunk by people, but force fed to the pack mules and horses to numb them enough to make dangerous black-market trips over the snowbound mountain and into Iraq.The main characters are the children, totally without whimsy or sentiment that simply try and make do without parents. That this includes a severely handicapped boy who not only needs daily medication but an operation to prolong his life - and their inventive means to try and fund that is bound to fire our emotions and one admires with both pride and pity.This is definitely one of those very rare (& indeed, it is rare, i.e difficult to see/get hold of) that WILL affect you and probably far more than you'd dare realise. Ten out of 10.

awmurshedkar A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES – 9.8/10 Director: Bahman Ghobadi Writer:Bahman GhobadiAnother Iranian classic: a tale of love and unimaginable suffering, a tale so surreal that is hard to come to terms with the unfair nature of life and the stoic mannerism in which it is dealt with. When a director's first film wins Camera d'Or at Cannes, there is a good reason why you need to see it. The film follows the standard Iranian formula of children being the central protagonists and driving force in the film. One might feel this is exploitation, and may be to some extent it is, but placing children in situations that they face in reality does not amount to tear jerking melodrama. The film is rather brute and unflinching in its approach. It quickly moves from character to story and continues to enhance both as it proceeds. Cinéma vérité, the style which has come to define Iranian cinema over the course of the last few decades once again brings to light the documentary treatment necessary for such a subject that would otherwise classify as queasy. Border crossing and smuggling on the Kurdish-Iraqi-Iranian border, the populace suffering at the hands of the military appear in several other films. While in this case, the film deals with the dilemma of Ayoub, played by Ayoub Ahmadi, who has to find a way to garner the money necessary for his ailing spasticated brother Madi, convincingly portrayed by Madi Ekhtiar-dini, the backdrop nevertheless speaks of political turmoil affecting lives of innocent civilians on day to day basis. The indescribable state of people living in harsh conditions are best put forth by an objective narrative, without any attempts to milk the situation in an attempt to tug at the emotional chords of the viewers.A Time for Drunken Horses is a must see, an indispensable gem to the list of many from Iranian directors. While it is not suited for the audience looking for a pop corn film, nor is it meant to appease or please, it does have moments that will stay with you. While I can hardly imagine why any mass audience would like to see stark realities, especially ones they wish and are thankful to have escaped, the film is an experience, one that makes it essential viewing.

Spleen Neorealism can never be GREAT cinema - but then, directors like Ghobadi, at their best, aren't primarily interested in creating great cinema. They want to show us other people's lives. It's worthwhile when it succeeds, and it succeeds here. There's a bracing purity of purpose: clean, fresh images (the hand-held camera work getting in the way only once) of real people. But something gets in the way...Ayoub's three-year-old brother Madi needs an operation within four weeks. Without it he will die. With it, he will live for at most eight months, and then die anyway. He cannot be cured.THAT'S what drives Ayoub - and I wish it had been something else. I wish it hadn't been impressed so heavily upon us that the POINT of this dangerous crossing and re-crossing of the Iran/Iraq border is to save Madi's life. It's a flimsy point. Madi can't be leading a happy life (he's deformed, he requires constant medication, he looks like he's suffering - indeed, Ayoub says at one point that Madi was "in pain all night"), and there's no chance, NO chance, that Madi will reach adulthood, or even the age of five. To be blunt: the operation isn't worth the money it will cost to perform.Of course, man's (or boy's) quest is his own. If Ayoub wants to pursue this particular quixotic project, good luck to him. But it doesn't make much emotional sense to me. We never see what Madi means to Ayoub. We know that Madi isn't all Ayoub has left in the world: he has two sisters, and even if the elder one is to be married off by their uncle and never heard from again, Ayoub clearly also loves his youngest sister - and he doesn't seem to have lost hope in himself. Deciding to sacrifice so much to briefly prolong the painful life of someone he knows to be doomed anyway, strikes me as unworthy of him. No doubt many people will think that he MUST do so, because any human life is always worth more than any amount of money, etc. But it's rich people who think like this. Deep down even they know it isn't really true. The money Ayoub plans to spend on Madi's operation could easily turn out to have been the only thing that could have saved him or his sister from starvation. Or slavery.In short, and for other reasons as well, the film would have been improved and in fact offered a BETTER illustration of what the Kurdish people are up against if Madi and everything associated with him had simply been excised from the story. The overall pattern of events could easily have been exactly the same, couldn't it? Only it would have meant more.