Director

BAHMAN GHOBADI was born in 1969 in Bané, Iranian Kurdistan. During his studies, he worked in radio before joining a group of young amateur filmmakers, with whom he started to make short films. He then moved to the capital to study cinema. Between 1995 and 1999, he directed ten short films which won a number of prizes in various national and international Festivals, in particular the Special Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand Festival for Life in Fog. In 1999 he worked as first assistant to Abbas Kiarostami during the shooting of the film The Wind Will Carry Us. He is one of the main actors in Samira Makhmalbaf's film Blackboards. A Time for Drunken Horses marks his debut in directing full-length films; this is also the first Kurdo-Iranian film in the history of cinema, winning the Camera D'Or and the Prix de la Jeunesse at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight in 2000. It was also entered in the Bergamo Film Meeting in 2001.

Iranian Kurdistan, at the border with Iraq: tremendously poor life conditions. The only source of income is the traffic of goods, a miserable smuggling activity on the harsh mountains which divide the two countries.

On the back of a mule or carried on the back by men, under the fire of the ambushes, despite the vigilant eye of the custom officers.

Amongst the many people who survive in this way, a young orphan: he is the family breadwinner, who has to support two adolescent sisters, a baby brother and another brother suffering from a life-threatening and rare malformation.

The eldest sister accepts a combined marriage, because the future Iraqi husband seems willing to help pay towards the brother's operation. But the mother-in-law rejects the ill boy and offers, in exchange, a mule…

Photos
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