✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Austria, France, Iran · 2007
1h 48m
Director Bahman Ghobadi
Starring Golshifteh Farahani, Ismail Ghaffari, Farzin Sabooni, Kambiz Arshi
Genre Comedy, Drama, Music
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Mamo, a legendary Kurdish musician living in Iran, plans to give one final concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. After seven months of trying to get a permit and rounding up his ten sons, he sets out for the long and troublesome journey in a derelict bus, denying a recurring vision of his own death at half moon.
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Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi's picturesque road trip is less about preserving a musical heritage than accepting one's fate, a mythic trek that's both heartrending and boisterous--often as hauntingly absurdist as a Kusturica carnival.
Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall
The suspicion and contempt the band encounters along the way symbolize the Kurds' historical sufferings, but the movie has many comic moments courtesy of the eager bus driver, who keeps putting his foot in his mouth. The nonprofessional cast is highly persuasive under the sure hand of director Bahman Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses).
An unflinching and affecting depiction of the region’s tragic lunacies.
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Fateful and funny, haunting and magical.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
This is a road movie unlike any other, the comical and mystical odyssey of old Mamo (an extraordinary performance by Ismail Ghaffari), a venerated musician who heads for Iraq from exile in Kurdish Iran with a busload of his musician sons to give a concert after Saddam's fall.
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
Ghobadi always uses non-pro actors but you would never know. In fact, professionals wouldn't do theses roles justice since the recruited performers are partly playing themselves and partly playing people Ghobadi has known since he was a boy.
In a boom time for movies about the scars of the battlefield, Half Moon reminds that the unending strife and religious fundamentalism of the Middle East kills not just people but culture too.
By terms moving and funny, the story reaches its apex when Half Moon, a beautiful young woman played by Golshifteh Farahani, makes her appearance from out of nowhere. Is she real, or perhaps an angel? You'll have fun trying to come up with an answer.
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