Movie Review: A Time for Drunken Horses directed by Bahman Ghobadi

 

One more movie until 2020 is officially gone. In just a couple of days I will dearly miss those days when I am doing nothing but searching for new movies to watch, crossed which book to read first and trying to find some time for writing my reviews. Soon, way too soon, I should be back in the business and there is nothing I can do about it. Except, as usual, get the best of each and every moment of my troubled life.

A Time for Drunken Horses belongs to the realistic branch of the Iranian cinema, with a pronounced social outline. The film director, Bahman Ghobadi, worked once as an assistant for Kiarostami - that I used to love a lot because I was completely ignorant about other significant voices - is of Kurdish origin. This movie is considered the first Kurdish film ever produced in Iran and it is inspired of the life in a marginal village at the Iranian-Iraqi border.

Movies with a social topic can be done beyond any ideological bias. The focus on a given reality that the artist is describing realistically does not need any matrix. I am not a Marxist, the opposite of a socialist, but I always find inspiration in social everyday life topics, both in my writing, the books I am reading or the movies I am watching. 

In A Time for Drunken Horses, five orphaned children in a poor Kurdish village at the border are fighting to survive the everyday life. Life or death are irrelevant, survival is the daily challenge. There is so much strength and fragility in the way in which those children are coping naturally with their situation. The children actors are excellent players and bring so much depth to the movie. Their kindness and solidarity in a world of adults that is using them without regrets and second thoughts is moving. I felt both sad and morally invigorated after watching this movie, because it shows the simple human struggles that we may not expect so dramatically experienced by little children. 

I watched the movie on MUBI, which proved to be in the last weeks a precious source of quality movies featuring outstanding film directors from all over the world.

Rating: 4 stars