Iranians Win Golden Camera In Double Triumph

Along with 20-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf, who won the Jury prize for her second film "Blackboards", they have achieved a remarkable hat trick of triumphs for Iranian cinema. Ghobadi, 31, also starred in Makhmalbaf's film "Blackboards" which like his own film, was shot on location near the Kurdish border.

"A Time for Drunken Horses" had already been awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) prize.

Assistant on Kiarostami's award-winning "The Wind Will Carry Us Away", Ghobadi made his film on a 120,000 dollar budget using non-professionals. The story recounts the adventures of a family of young orphans attempting to cross the border into Iraq while carrying contraband.

For the child actors, Ghobadi says, "this was not acting, it was their reality."

Yektapanah, 37, was Kiarostami's assistant on "The Taste of Cherry", Golden Palm winner in 1997.

Zamani Barayé Masti Asbha (A Time For Drunken Horses)

Although Zamani Barayé Masti Asbha (A Time For Drunken Horses) is his first feature film and a contender for Camera d'Or honors, Bahman Ghobadi is an all-round talent on the Iranian film scene. Born in 1969 in Bané in northeast Iran, he has made several short films and documentaries, assisted Abbas Kiarostami on The Wind Will Carry Us (a Venice competition entry last year), and can be seen acting in Samira Makhmalbaf's Takhté Siah (Blackboards) in this year's Cannes competition selection.

In fact, Bahman Ghobadi plays the lead role in Blackboards as the teacher Reeboir, who wanders across mountainous paths with a blackboard on his back as he attempts to attract students to attend makeshift classes and learn to read and write. A Time For Drunken Horses and Blackboards have much more in common than first meets the eye; both were shot in Iranian Kurdistan with its austere landscape, impoverished people and politically sensitive cultural issues.

Ghobadi began making short films at 26. That Man Has Arrived (1995), Again Rain With The Song (1995), Dang (1996), Part Of The Notebook (1996), God's Fish (1996), Like Mother (1996), The Reception (1996), To Live In A Fog (1998), and Melodies Of A Girl From The Steppes (1998) were all socially oriented with an eye for the human and the personal. The best known of these, To Live In A Fog, won awards at several international film festivals. Along the way, he formed his own production company, Bahman Ghobadi Films, to write, direct and produce A Time For Drunken Horses.

Shot in and around Bané in the language of the inhabitants (Kurdish and Persian), A Time For Drunken Horses is the poignant story of children having to provide for themselves in Iranian Kurdistan near the Iraqi border. For this neo-realist film, constructed around actual events, Bahman Ghobadi has chosen non-professional actors from the same family, Nezhad, Amaneh and Madi Ektiar-Dini, to play the lead roles, together with inhabitants from the villages of Sardab and Bané.

Djomeh

"My long association with Abbas Kiarostami was a great blessing for me," said Hassan Yektapanah in an interview with Mohammad Atebbai in Film International, an informed Iranian cinema journal. "He not only taught me cinema, but how to look at the world."

Competing at Cannes for the Camera d'Or, Yektapanah's first feature, Djomeh, took a year to complete and was seven months in post-production. Yektapanah, in other words, is a perfectionist: he wrote, directed, edited and was the art director on Djomeh, which was initially titled Relationship but was then changed because it sounded "too professional and commercial".

Born in 1963, Yektapanah is one of those committed artists who started his film career at a very young age. First, he was simply part of a production crew, then he worked his way up to become first assistant director to Ali Hatami, Tahmineh Milani, Jafar Panahi (The Mirror), Ebrahim Forouzesh (The Little Man) and finally Abbas Kiarostami (The Taste Of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us).

After 14 years of observing film production in close-up, Yektapanah penned a script, honed it to his liking, and handed it to Kiarostami. He, in turn, liked Djomeh enough to help him find a producer, then visited the set during the shooting and eventually managed to make contact with a French co-producer.

Djomeh is the story of three lonely people. The young Djomeh (Jalil Nazari) is one of two Afghan laborers who work on a dairy farm in the remote Iranian countryside for a middle-aged dairy owner who never married. Each morning, they accompany the owner to nearby villages to buy milk that, on the farm, will be turned into dairy products for sale. During these outings, due to Djomeh's outgoing personality and desire to strike up conversations, they begin to talk "about ideas, ideals, society, world views, and philosophy," as Yektapanah puts it. "I made every effort to keep the film realistic," he says. "I tried to make the camera and acting imperceptible, so that the dialogue and everything else would be very similar to ordinary routine life. That's all I can say about the film."

When Djomeh falls in love with Setareh (Mahbobeh Khalili), a local girl, he turns to the dairy owner Mahmoud (Mahmoud Behraznia) to serve as chaperone. This is a bold gesture, since Djomeh is crossing cultural boundaries as strict Iranian courtship customs do not allow for open courtship