A haunting film about the clash between human resolve and political reality, Half Moon, directed by internationally renowned Kurdish auteur Bahman Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly), provides a sophisticated vision of the new realities of the Kurdistan region after the US invasion of Iraq. Mamo, an iconic Kurdish musician in the twilight of his life and in failing health, must lead a dozen of his sons to Iraq for a concert to celebrate the fall of Saddam Hussein and the end of his repression of Kurdish music. Their increasingly tortuous journey across a maze of borders proves by turn dangerous and surreal, paralleling the predicament of Kurdish identity in a hostile political world.
Filmmaker's Biography
Bahman Ghobadi was born in 1969, in Baneh, near the Iran-Iraq border in the province of Iranian Kurdistan. Ghobadi studied industrial photography and film directing at the Iranian Broadcasting College, and developed a focus for his films as he traveled and collected stories from the Kurdish people he encountered. Both his documentary and dramatic films highlight the beauty and the hardship of Kurdish life on the Iraqi and Iranian border areas. Ghobadi’s short films quickly gained recognition in Iran and abroad. His full-length narrative A Time for Drunken Horses (1999) is considered the first Kurdish feature film in Iranian cinematic history.
