Audio transcription

Ghobadi’s first feature effort instantly launched him as an important Iranian filmmaker, and one uniquely concerned with the struggles of the Kurds. The film follows the fortunes of a family of motherless children, whose father has departed to work as a smuggler along the Iran-Iraq border to support them. In his absence, the eldest child, severely handicapped, has become in need of serious medical attention. His younger brother becomes a smuggler in turn, in a desperate attempt to raise the necessary money. Ghobadi has spoken of the film’s cruel snowy landscape as the reflection of a Kurdish ambivalence towards nature; Kurdistan is beautiful but the mountainous landscape is also the site of so much suffering. Exemplifying this suffering, the snow also serves to downplay the landscape’s beauty and foreground its starkness. – DP