This is a very remarkable film: a blazingly passionate, spiritual bulletin from a contemporary front-line of almost unimaginable hardship. Bahman Ghobadi's movie is about a group of orphaned Kurdish children who live on the poverty line in a village near the Iran-Iraq border. Periodically, the children scramble aboard a truck to take them to Iraq to work in the market, or as foot- soldiers in various smuggling scams. That, or they transport heavy tires in the snow and terrible cold - backbreaking work for which they are routinely cheated of their pay, and for which the conditions are so appalling that the mules and horses have to be fed whiskey to get them to work. This would be an image of brilliant black comedy in another sort of film, in which the leniency of irony would be an admissible solvent for the terrible emotional and physical pain that the children endure. But this is a film with its own unflinching gaze, a film that makes children bear the burden of an existence too much for any adult. Like many another recent Iranian film - Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards, Majid Majidi's The Children of Heaven and Abolfazl Jalili's Daan - this makes children the centre of the action. It is a technique that has tended to place adult political happenings in the realm of fable, and has been seen as either evasive or ingeniously expedient. Whatever the truth, Iranian film has brilliantly exploited the power of children's faces in a way that Hollywood, fatally infected as it is with cutesiness and manipulation, seems entirely incapable. The difference with Ghobadi's children is that they do not have the enigma or reticence that a lot of children have in current Iranian cinema. They are in the grip of terrifying emotions: connected not with their dead parents, or the unutterable grimness of their lives - burdens they carry with heartbreaking stoicism - but rather with the immediate problem of raising enough money for an operation for their disabled brother, Madi. Advertisement When Madi receives his daily injections, and is finally carried away across the border in a mule pannier, the pathos is all the more extraordinary for the unyielding toughness of how these events are presented - the sheer rugged blankness of Ghobadi's cinematic canvas. And when the children's older sister is spirited away through the snow to be married off to a family in a nearby village, this is not greeted with anything like the muted acceptance: rather, her brother cries harsh and bitter tears, orphaned a second time. Eventually, political events impinge on the children's lives in the form of an ambush and gunfire off-camera, as they desperately try to lash their inebriated horses into action. As in Blackboards, it is an almost surreal depiction of military events on the margins of children's lives, occurring like the interventions of the gods. This is a film with a fierce, spare, beautiful cinematic language, a movie with a steely clarity that does not diminish its compassion and spiritual generosity.
