A Time for Drunken Horses

Bahman Ghobadi's first feature, 2000, formally placed Kurdish cinema on the world map by winning the Caméra d'Or at Cannes. It is set on the mountainous Iran–Iraq border in winter, where five orphaned Kurdish children struggle to survive after their father's death. One of them, Madi, suffers a hereditary illness and needs an urgent operation that can only be had in Iraq. The brothers join a perilous smugglers' caravan over the snowed-in peaks — where the horses are given alcohol to bear the deathly cold, hence the title. The camera holds tight to the children's faces and follows, slowly, the brutality of life on the borders that have cut the Kurdish nation. Every actor is an amateur from villages of Iranian Kurdistan, none of whom had ever stepped into an acting class.