[Sidebar] November 30 - December 7, 2000
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A Time for Drunken Horses

Actually, they're mules, but you'd drink heavily too if you had to carry enormous tires on your back over snowbound mountains laced with minefields and menaced by army patrols. All the same, they're probably better off than the humans in Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi's earnest first feature. Set in a Kurdish village in the bleak, beautiful wastelands on the Iran-Iraq border, this is the semi-autobiographical tale of young Ayoub (Ayoub Amadh), a sturdy preteen with a lot of responsibilities. His mother is dead, his father, a smuggler, has disappeared, and he has to make do for his numerous siblings (the press kit puts the number at five). Neediest is his older brother Madi (Mehdi Ekhtiar-Dini), who suffers not only from dwarfism and crippling deformities but has a terminal disease requiring an expensive operation. So Ayoub tries various ways of making money. He joins a mule train of smugglers crossing the border, offers his sister Ameneh (Ameneh Ekhtiar-Dini) in marriage, and tries to sell the family mule. His bad luck makes Bicycle Thieves look like a light-hearted farce, and overall the film's unrelenting misery comes off as a badly acted, clumsily narrated parody of the Iranian children's movie genre. Those drunken horses, or mules, do have style, however: an uncanny scene in which their burdens roll down a snowy hillside makes this Time almost well spent. At the Avon.
-- Peter Keough
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