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Bookmark this pageHalf Moon (2006)
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Movie review
From Time Out London
There was a haunting, lyrical approach to war in ‘Turtles Can Fly’, this Kurdish Iranian director’s last film, which is evident again in this work commissioned by Peter Sellars to celebrate Mozart’s 250th birthday and which applies some of the same sense of mortality as ‘Requiem’ to the Kurdish experience after Saddam. An elderly Kurdish musician, Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari), is travelling by bus with his ten musical sons to perform a concert in Iraqi Kurdistan – the first for 37 years. Mamo insists on smuggling a female singer (Hedye Tehrani), an insistence which, since women are prohibited from performing, causes an atmosphere of fear and conflict. It sounds like a simple post-war road trip, but Ghobadi adds a ghostly element to this tale of oppression that’s bolstered by the Kurdish music on the soundtrack and the film’s alluring photography. There’s something Styxian about the road travelled here that’s reinforced with imagery of death that elevates Ghobadi’s tale above the everyday.Author: Dave Calhoun
Time Out London Issue 1950: January 2-8 2007
Cast & crew
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Ismail Ghaffari, Allah-Morad Rashtian, Farzin Sabooni, Kambiz Arshi, Sadiq Behzadpoor, Ali Ashraf Rezai, Reza Haj Khosravi, Mohamad Nahid, Bahram Zarei, Hedye Tehrani, Hassan Poorshirazi full cast
Rated: 15
Duration: 114 mins
UK Release: Jan 4 2008
US Release: Dec 14 2007
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