Screened as part of NZIFF 2007

Half Moon 2006

Niwemang

Directed by Bahman Ghobadi

Bahman Ghobadi's (A Time for Drunken Horses) beautiful new film sees an ailing father lead his sons to Iraq to celebrate the fall of Saddam Hussein. Gritty, poetic and alive with rousing Kurdish music.

Austria / France / Iran / Iraq In Farsi and Kurdish with English subtitles
113 minutes CinemaScope

Director

Screenplay

Bahman Ghobadi
,
Behnam Behzadi

Photography

Nigel Bluck
,
Crighton Bone

Editor

Hayedeh Safiyari

Music

Hossein Alizadeh

With

Ismail Ghaffari
,
Allah Morad Rashtiani

Festivals

Toronto, Pusan 2006

Elsewhere

Half Moon is the moving and beautiful new film from Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, who has stunned audiences in recent years with A Time for Drunken Horses and Turtles Can Fly… Despite his waning health, Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari) must lead a dozen of his sons to Iraq for a concert – “a cry of freedom” – to celebrate the fall of Saddam Hussein and the end of his repression of Kurdish music… Their plan is to drive across the border between Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan for the big concert, but the road will be long and winding and the local wise man has predicted calamity… Ghobadi’s film is overflowing with beautifully lit, overwhelmingly evocative images… When the men arrive at a village of exiled Kurdish singers, hundreds of women in brightly-coloured garb drum and sing in unison – the effect is heart-stopping. Rarely has gritty naturalism and visual poetry been married so stirringly as in Half Moon. And appropriately… enough there is also plenty of rousing Kurdish music.” — Dimitri Eipides, Toronto Film Festival