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Why so much hype?

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Admirable film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

An Iranian film about the day to day reality of life for the Kurdish minority, which also exists in Iraq, Turkey and Syria. The film reveals their harsh life, the injustices they experience, pointing towards and justifying their desire for an independent Kurdish state.The father of a Kurdish family has died and their situation becomes desperate when on of the children urgently requires medical attention. The eldest son, Ayoub, becomes head of the family and takes responsibility for earning sufficient money for them to survive and to afford an operation for his brother. Their survival often requires the smuggling of goods across the Iraq/Iran border through snow covered mountains in extremely inhospitable conditions. The mules/horses used for transport are often given alcohol to dull their senses against the harsh environment.A slow film, as is required by the story. Wonderful acting, especially from the children.

Neorealism can never be GREAT cinema - but then, directors like Ghobadi, at their best, aren't primarily interested in creating great cinema. They want to show us other people's lives. It's worthwhile when it succeeds, and it succeeds here. There's a bracing purity of purpose: clean, fresh images (the hand-held camera work getting in the way only once) of real people. But something gets in the way...Ayoub's three-year-old brother Madi needs an operation within four weeks. Without it he will die. With it, he will live for at most eight months, and then die anyway. He cannot be cured.THAT'S what drives Ayoub - and I wish it had been something else. I wish it hadn't been impressed so heavily upon us that the POINT of this dangerous crossing and re-crossing of the Iran/Iraq border is to save Madi's life. It's a flimsy point. Madi can't be leading a happy life (he's deformed, he requires constant medication, he looks like he's suffering - indeed, Ayoub says at one point that Madi was "in pain all night"), and there's no chance, NO chance, that Madi will reach adulthood, or even the age of five. To be blunt: the operation isn't worth the money it will cost to perform.Of course, man's (or boy's) quest is his own. If Ayoub wants to pursue this particular quixotic project, good luck to him. But it doesn't make much emotional sense to me. We never see what Madi means to Ayoub. We know that Madi isn't all Ayoub has left in the world: he has two sisters, and even if the elder one is to be married off by their uncle and never heard from again, Ayoub clearly also loves his youngest sister - and he doesn't seem to have lost hope in himself. Deciding to sacrifice so much to briefly prolong the painful life of someone he knows to be doomed anyway, strikes me as unworthy of him. No doubt many people will think that he MUST do so, because any human life is always worth more than any amount of money, etc. But it's rich people who think like this. Deep down even they know it isn't really true. The money Ayoub plans to spend on Madi's operation could easily turn out to have been the only thing that could have saved him or his sister from starvation. Or slavery.In short, and for other reasons as well, the film would have been improved and in fact offered a BETTER illustration of what the Kurdish people are up against if Madi and everything associated with him had simply been excised from the story. The overall pattern of events could easily have been exactly the same, couldn't it? Only it would have meant more.

I don't know where to begin to comment about this incredible movie. First of all.....what has happened to these children? I realize this is a movie but these were real kids and the child that needed the operation was not acting......Do they have parents? Can the film makers be reached?This unique film bridges the gap between life and film. It haunts me.It makes "movie star" movies look even more superficial and empty.

This is one of the most astounding movies I have ever seen! I knew nothing at all about the movie before I went to see it, other than that it was Kurdish and "very good". So at first I thought it was a documentary, so well acted was it by the young, unprofessional cast. No doubt this impression was enforced by much hand-held camera footage: the scenes of Kurdish smugglers fighting on the Iran/Iraq border just HAD to be real!Visually it is stunning in an horrific, bleak & beautiful sort of way. I was reminded in parts of certain aspects of the vision of Werner Herzog, in regard to the long treks through vistas of unending Snow & Rock. I literally started to shiver sitting there in the cinema!The plight of the brave Kurdish children is heart-rending and at the same time heartening; their great strength and inherent nobility gob-smacked this old Western decadent! It is still hard to sift the reality of their experiences from the fiction of the story as portrayed in this movie. None of the cast are professional actors, I gather, by the fact that they all used their real names.And there aint no trite and "Disney" conclusion to this provoking visit to an inverted Shangri-La: this movie bites!Do yourself a favour: see it!