Who's in It: Ismail Ghaffari, Golshifteh Farahani, Hedieh Tehrani
The Basics: Mamo is a well-known Kurdish musician that we're introduced to as he lies in an open grave. He gets to rise from that grave and perform again when Saddam Hussein falls from power. Not that it gets that much easier. He gets in a beat-up old bus and travels with his sons to a concert, but the road there has more than a few obstacles: checkpoint guards, American soldiers and the prospect of still singing illegally if he chooses to bring a female vocalist along for the ride.
What's the Deal? Director Bahman Ghobadi's recurring theme is the exile and oppression of the Kurdish people. He doesn't have a lot of happy endings up his sleeve, but he's already a master of telling heart-stopping stories of fear and struggle and of desperate people moving through seemingly impossible-to-navigate circumstances. And chances are you haven't seen any Kurdish films. This one would make a great introduction.
Open Call in Iraq: One of my favorite things about Ghobadi's films is that he uses non-actors in all the roles and still manages to get effective, emotional performances out of them. I mean, yes, they're all speaking Kurdish and Farsi, so it's not like I'm getting the nuances of their line delivery, but it all plays out as naturally and movingly as if they were pros and faking it all the way.
Best Part: To fetch the woman Mamo dreams of collaborating with, they stop in a village that's home to 1,334 exiled female singers. All of them are singing together and beating on drums simultaneously, and it's one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a movie all year.
What Mozart and Strand Releasing's Got to Do With It: It's one of seven movies made in response to a commission by the New Crowned Hope Festival, an event that commemorated the 250th birthday of Mozart. The other films created for the festival were Tsai Ming-Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century, both released earlier this year and already on DVD. And all three of the movies were picked up for American distribution by the intrepid and awesome Strand. I'm thinking of sending them a Christmas present for making sure these three amazing movies got theatrical and DVD releases in the United States.