They can make us laugh, scare us or just keep us pleasantly entertained for a couple of hours. But one of the noblest things the movies can do is help us gain an understanding of a different cultural viewpoint.
In the everyday life of the Kurds, an ethnic minority in the border region of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, there is a profusion of hardship and toil, and also a tragic and unique beauty.
Kurdish Director Bahman Ghobadi's "A Time for Drunken Horses," winner of the Camera d'Or prize for best first-time feature film at this year's Cannes Film Festival, creates a touching and vivid picture of that life.
The film deals with one family of five Iranian Kurd children whose mother and smuggler father are both recently deceased. Poignantly narrated by one of the children, Ameneh (Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini), it documents the struggle of her older brother Ayoub (Ayoub Ahmadi) to get an operation for their terminally ill brother Madi (Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini).
Ayoub finds work smuggling goods across the border to Iraq. Because of the cold, the smugglers have to give their mules vodka to get them to work, an inhumane practice that gives the film its title.
The rather plotless, "slice of life" style of the film's action is difficult to make both interesting and believable. "A Time for Drunken Horses" not only pulls off this feat, but manages to do so for a culture with which most viewers will not be familiar, against a background of beautiful and evocative cinematography.
The film also scores with excellent casting from real people who have seen real situations like the ones in the film. Their own experiences give the young actors' performances a depth and intensity that draw the viewer into the world the film creates.
But if "A Time for Drunken Horses" has one fault, it is that the audience will occasionally find the action difficult to follow due to inadequate subtitles during several key scenes.
