Half Moon

It is a story about a famous elderly patriarch tyrant going a journey with his ten sons from Iran to Kurdish Iraq to give one final concert.

On the way he repeatedly encounters police and military who vandalise and terrorise just for the sheer pleasure of bullying.

The route is a bleak mountainous landscape. I could not imagine even a goat eking a living much less people. Everyone is dirty and unkempt and not completely sane. The singers smoke and hack up phlegm.

They wish to have a female singer to accompany them, but even travelling while female is illegal. It is infuriating not being able to smash the ignorant thugs who enforce this stupid law.

It goes from bad to worse to worse to even worse. The concert never happens. This is a gruelling film. The characters evoke pity rather than sympathy. One of the sons has a pet cockerel that looks a bit like a miniature dinosaur. Not even he is spared the gratuitous cruelty.

Half Moon is a road movie with a difference. An elderly man Moma (portrayed with great range and nuance by Ismail Ghaffari), a celebrity singer in his native Iraqi Kurdistan, sets out by bus from Iran with an entourage of his musician sons to his homeland to perform in a large public concert. With seven months of rehearsals, official permits and visas carefully arranged, nothing could go wrong, right? Well, this is border country between bitter enemies Iran, Iraq and the highly marginalised Kurds who are basically a dispossessed people without a country and held in contempt by both countries as well as Turkey. This film illustrates what can go wrong.

While beautifully filmed in some beautifully stark landscapes, the real richness of Half Moon - like most Iranian films screened here - is in the simplicity of the story and the attention to detail to the struggles of seemingly mundane activities. The cultural aspects are especially fascinating. The authority of Moma as the family patriarch is evident; his middle aged sons all hold him in high esteem and cower before him. Not unexpectedly,as Iran does not allow women to sing in public, there are specific issues with involving a woman in such a cultural endeavour.

The family and social dynamics depicted breathe life into this little gem of a film. Music is a universal language that binds people, so when contempt is shown by the Iranian border guards, it has a powerful effect on the audience. My in-laws are similarly musicians of a dispossessed people (Pontians, Greek orthodox who once lived in Turkey), so I could relate well to the scenario in the film.

It was interesting to see the advancement of technologies such as cell phones and wireless internet laptops creeping into these otherwise isolated communities. The film is full of beautifully understated performances and naturalistic humour and drama. I highly recommend it, and like most Iranian films I have seen, is something I would take my six year old son to see (were it to get a theatrical release).

This movie is poetry in action. It has elements of the humorous, dark, ridiculous, sublime, mysterious, evocative all rolled in. The actual events shown somehow faded from the overall sense of poetic experience at the end of the movie. The music ranges from tragic to enchanting and it's a primary component of the movie. It is shown to have powers to bring back the dead. The landscapes shown are also stunning and stark. Its almost like the natural environment is designed for expression of grief – which reflects the political situation in the region. The final product is powerful. I would like to watch more from this Director – he definitely has a keen eye for the subtle. He has intelligently showcased optimism for life with its incumbent struggles and sometimes futility.

Reviewed at its 3rd & final screening Sat. Sept 16, 2006 at the Varsity 3 cinema during the Toronto International Film Festival. The film had world premiered earlier during the fest on Sept 9 at the Isabel Bader Theatre.

This road movie with touches of dark comedy was a pleasure to see and touched the heart many times. It is story of a "Kurdish Mozart" (as imagined by the director - a fictional living legend Kurdish composer/musician with a whole orchestra of sons and daughters) and his struggle to get to a major music festival in Iraqi Kurdistan from Irani Kurdistan. It was fascinating and life-affirming.

Even as the film had several moments of desperation and despair on the way the whole thing was lightened by touches like a comedic bus driver, various moments of interaction between the father and his sometimes reluctant or rebellious sons and the resilience of a young woman named Papooli (Butterfly) who was born with the name Niwe mung (Half Moon).

Director Bahman Ghobadi was an enthusiastic show-up for the 3rd screening and gave many interesting tidbits during his Q&A such as info on the banning of female singing and musicians in present day Iran for the past 28 years, that his self-censorship on the film did not help it to get past Irani censors so that he may re-cut the film for the later general international release now anyway (restoring more scenes of female singing & playing) and that the whole 7 months of seeking for travel permits subplot in this film was a nod to the struggles he had to get his earlier "Turtles Can Fly" film made.

This film was 1 of 7 in TIFF 2006's Mozart - A New Crowned Hope series which is a sneak peek at the series before it screens at the Vienna Mozart Year Festival in December 2006.

Highly recommended and a worthy successor to the director's previous films.

in this movie the story is telling the what was happened in the east of turkey, ıraq , and persia, there are a lot of kurdish people and in ıraq saddam was executed a lot of kurdish people just they talking their language . thus many of them are move to the Iran,turkey and others. so that this story is told a man whose last wish is to sing a song in the land that he was born. but it is not that easy to went there . still in this days in turkey and Iran it is forbidden to talk kurdish. so that there are many people who really want to live their culture freely. if you don't understand or feel this feeling this movie will just be an ordinary movie. but if you feel that feeling you can see that how the director made a great project