This magnificent second film (2002) by Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi reprises all the memorable motifs and horrific imagery of his acclaimed A Time for Drunken Horses (orphaned children, a countryside studded with land mines, bleak employment prospects that make semisuicidal smuggling the only option) and adds a few more terrors (genocidal bombings, widowed women disfigured and dying from chemical-warfare attacks). Except that here, everything foregrounded in Ghobadi’s first picture becomes the everyday backdrop to a quasi farce that tracks a family of musicians in their noisy, squabbling, absurdist, and revelatory trek from Iran to Iraq in search of the patriarch’s first wife. In Kurdish with subtitles. 110 min.
