Kurdish filmmaker Bhaman Ghobadi has achieved international acclaim with his previous films A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq and Turtles Can Fly. In his latest, Half Moon, Ghobadi uses the rugged Kurdistan landscape, and makes it into a moving, and emotionally rich film. Reportedly based on Mozart’s Requiem, the film manages to wrest the desolation and supposed despair of the Kurdistan landscape and infuse it with a celebration of art, a tribute to the human spirit and a simple joy of being.

The film looks at a group of Kurdish musicians, who decide to perform a concert in newly liberated Iraq. The head of the group is Mamo, a celebrated Kurdish musician, who brings his ten sons (yes, there are definitely absurdist qualities to the film, especially given that some of the sons look older than Mamo) along with him as his musical accompaniment. They hire a rickety bus, which one wonders how it could drive on highways, let alone the rugged Kurdish landscape. He also needs a female singer, but as Iran does not allow female singers, they have to resort to rather desperate smuggling tactics.

There is a wide variety of tones in this film – absurdist, slapstick, philosophical meditation, slightly supernatural, drama etc. There’s the link to Mozart – a rather profound look at life via the absurd and the tragic. Occasionally this can gel a little awkwardly, but for the most part it’s a highly enjoyable mélange. It also feels a bit like a magical realist text (where does the woman at the end come from???), a stew of myth, realism and history. The film’s leisurely pace can often belie this complex mixture. Ghobadi pays homage to the collective spirit, which to him transcends the petty borders and draconian rules made by particular countries. Even then, he’s also realist enough to capture the dangers and perhaps, near impossibility of this aim – corrupt Iranian border officials, American soldiers firing randomly, violent Turkish border patrols.

There is also much to admire aesthetically in Half Moon. The sound is quite beautiful, and the music is especially brilliant; occasionally achieving transcendence, it’s a form of escape and protest despite the conditions they find themselves in. Visually, the film is also ravishing, harsh desolate landscapes, that could easily make the individuals appear insignificant. Iran over the last couple of decades has made some wonderful films, and this is another worthy addition.—Brannavan Gnanalingam