"Blackboards"
(in Kurdish with English subtitles) the striking, surrealistic film by Samira
Makhmalbaf, is set in Hawraman mountains- the heartland of Southern
Kurdistan.
The contraband
boys risking the rugged, dangerous artificial border- both sides of divided
Kurdistan- and the dreamlike, operatic voyage of the old men -imbued with
horror and humor- is the return to their birthplace, the town of
"Halabja", over the border in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Unfortunately,
most of the tragic-humor does not work, probably due to poor timing and
editing, officially credited to the director's father Mohsen Makhmalbaf who
is esteemed as Iran’s Martin Scorsese.
Bahaman Ghobadi
-director of “A Time for Drunken Horses”- plays his teacher role much more
convincingly than Said Mohammadi, a sympathetic man, who does not get past ‘indicating’
his role as the second teacher. The talented Persian actress Behnaz Jafari
playing a Kurdish woman is about as a convincing as, say, Juliette Binoche
would be playing a an Italian village girl. Behnaz's impressive dark look, her
eye-catching body language and Kurdish delivery are all glaringly unauthentic.
But ignorance of the subtle differences between "cool" Persians and
the more "emotional" Kurds -similar to the differences between
French and Italians- maybe bliss: Western audiences would not notice.
Films such as ‘Blackboards’,
Yesim Ustaoglu ‘Journey To The Sun’, and Handan Ipekci’s
yet-to-be-released ‘Hejar’, are welcome: they inform the world about the
ill-known Kurdish tragedy. Perhaps significantly, these films about the ‘politically
incorrect” Kurds- the underdogs of Middle East- are all made by women. (Kiraostami’s ‘The Wind…’ does not refer to the Kurdish tragedy.) But
these films by non-Kurds share one thing in common: they strike the mind, and
perhaps amaze the imagination, but they don’t touch our hearts. (To be fair
Turkish ‘Hejar] is more emotional but Kurds may find it colored by pity and
condescension rather than by genuine feelings of common humanity.)
In Blackboards,
the scene toward the end with the woman, her child, and husband. all hiding
under the Blackboard from chemical attacks, is remarkable but fails to move
us. Contrast these films with the moving drama -and arousal of memorable
feelings it generates- of “A Time of Drunken Horses” by Bahman Ghobadi, a
Kurd who is clearly touched, rather than merely fascinated, by Kurdish woes.
Yet some of my ‘comfortable’ Iranian colleagues, ignorant or untouched by
Kurdish drama, more used to the usual ‘spiritual’ Iranian films’
meanderings over soft, ‘politically correct’, festival-pleasing subjects
-cute smart children and pretty women clad in black- deride ‘A Time…” as
a “Hollywood’ film!
Apparently, the
yet-to-be released Jiyan -a tragic love story set against Saddam’s gassing
at Halabja- by Jano Rosebiani, another Kurd deeply pained by his peoples’
wounds, is also emotional. Perhaps this is understandable: Didn't we also have
to wait for real Irish men, like Neil Jordan, and Jewish American directors,
as opposed to ‘distanced’ Anglo-Saxone directors- to make deeply-felt ‘emotional’
films about the Irish tragedy and Holocaust? Though some of these films, like
Bahman Ghobadi's Marooned In Iraq,, maybe judged by the ‘distanced’
highbrow as ‘nationalist’, or worse, ‘sentimental’!
Still, Samira
Makhmalbaf's unusual film Blackboard, with its striking visuals and
intriguing scenes, is well worth seeing. The Media would do justice to ‘Blackboards’,
and perhaps to its box office, to highlight that "Halabja" is the
"Kurdish 9/11": About 5000 Kurds were gassed to death in less than
five minutes. Hence Washington's repeated rhetoric: "Saddam gassed his
own people!"
Incidentally,
Kurds are not 'a minority.' Nor are they Persian's/Iran's, nor Turkey's, nor
Saddam's "own people"- any more than ,say, Italians or French if
still under German annexation would be "Germany or Hitler's own
people". But that's another long ‘sentimental’ story of the divided
and land-locked Kurdistan of 40 million Kurds between Iran, Turkey, Iraq and
Syria: none of these holy or self-righteous states -artificially concocted
after World War I- want to give up "their piece of Kurdistan- their own
minority" they appropriated through an accident of history/a cruel turn
of fate, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
