This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Better Late Then Never

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Released in 2000, BLACKBOARDS was the second film by Samira Makhmalbaf, daughter of acclaimed Iranian auteur Mohsen Makhmalbaf and a precocious director in her own right. As the film opens, a group of itinerant teachers lug blackboards into the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan, seeking to bring education to this illiterate, impoverished region in exchange for some meagre income.Two of the teachers quickly branch off from the group, and the film follows their adventures. Saïd (Saïd Mohamadi) falls in with a group of nomads trying to get back to their native land across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan. Rebwar (Bahman Ghobadi) meets a group of children transporting contraband over the border. The teacher's efforts to help the locals learn to read and write are rebuffed time and time again, to the point that the film takes on the quality of a play by Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter. Saïd's attempts to get through to the lone woman in the party (Behnaz Jafari) are the height of absurdism.Samira Makhmalbaf's visual aesthetic is mainly that of her father's early films, and the film evokes the beauty of this mountainous region, as well as the desolation that causes its poverty. And it's cool that the dialogue is in Kurdish, as there aren't so many films available in the West that highlight this people. However, I must say that I found other aspects disappointing. BLACKBOARDS makes a thought-provoking point that the poor are too busy surviving to worry about ideals like education, but the script doesn't really hang together. The acting is also inconsistent, with a big disconnect between the professional actors and the local Kurds who were brought on.You might take a chance on BLACKBOARDS. I certainly don't regret seeing it, it's memorable and there's some humour. But I remain unsatisfied.

Beautiful film about what happens when loftier ideas of learning and education meet the stark reality of day-to-day existence of nomadic Kurdish refugees.This story moves through the dusty Iran/Iraq landscapes like a painful wheeze, yet compels you stay on the path, mindful of every step.I find this especially moving now, during these gut-wrenching times in which we live, and considering the US's tattered and torn relationship with the people of the Middle East.If you're looking for star power, look elsewhere. I've not seen or heard of any of these actors, but I was completely satisfied with their genuine performances. This film is also subtitled, so some may consider that a deterrent but I didn't because the pacing of this movie allowed for it.Definitely worth a view, especially if you are a person who enjoys films that juxtapose the behavior of mankind vs. the human spirit.peace.

I understand the vigorous debate Samira Makhmalbaf's BLACKBOARDS, has generated, but I'd also say that I loved this very demanding but often moving film - a remarkable achievement for a very young, but already accomplished filmmaker. Watching her career develop will be quite a treat.Shot with hand-held cameras and featuring a Kurdish cast of non-actors, BLACKBOARDS is very slowly paced, with a rambling quality that captures the aimless down time of everyday life. However the restless camera work also fills the film with an unceasing tension, gradually revealing the desperation filling the stateless existances of the many nervous characters.The politics of the region are an ever-present backdrop to the story, and unfortunate political machinations render both education and basic survival an arduous complexity - to live and to gain even the most basic of educations are made into luxuries, which - even in desolate and strife-torn landscapes - some are willing to die for.A handful of moments stood out for me: the scenes set in the river camp showcase the warmest of human interactions, and the final scene is remarkably beautiful.This very rigorous film (superficially reminding me of both Abbas Kiarostami and Tsai Ming-liang) nonetheless had me hooked.

'Blackboards' is one of those films that has divided audiences between fanatical admirers and grumbling dissenters. The former admire the director's skilful juggling between formalism and humanism, individual quests and social movements, private moments and public set-pieces; her filming of landscape; her eliciting of unsentimental, compelling performances from an amateur cast; her insistence on enigma and loose ends; her portrait of life in extreme, harrowing conditions. The dissenters bemoan her fudging of politics - sure, she shows the exploitation of children, the mass displacement of the Kurds, and the murderous terror lurking behind every rock, but by refusing to put these in a contextual framework, such depictions are blunted in political force.there is a whiff of misogyny to me in these complaints. It's okay for men to make ambitious, universalising statements, but women must remain concerned with the local. Presumably Makhmalbaf would have been more political if she had concentrated on authenticating the patterns on the women's dresses. Of course, culture in general has moved towards the local: with post-modernism, very few artists have had the confidence to think on a large scale (I don't mean make large-scale films, which any fule kan do).This is presumably why 'Blackboards' reminds me of older types of artists. Most immediately, it could be a massive Beckett play, full of wandering vagrants in a vast, desolate landscape, peopled with Lucky-like slaves, surrounded by an unseen, God-like menace, occasionally erupting in capricious violence. Like Beckett, there is no real beginning or end, no context, just a sense of never-ending repetition with the only possible relief in death.Like Beckett (eg 'Waiting for Godot'), culture has no place in such an environment, indeed, seems a grotesque irrelevance, an incomprehensible babble, traces scraped in a landscape no-one can read now, never mind in the future. And yes, the film is as unremittingly hopeless as a Beckett play - there is no progress or redemption here. But it is as bleakly funny too - eg the whole marriage farrago between Said and Hahaleh; the game of marbles watched by her son; the tragicomic, very Beckettian inability of her aged father to relieve himself.In the film world, 'Blackboards' reminds me of no-one so much as Angelopolous, especially in a film like 'The Travelling players', where a group of itinerant outsiders observe and become absorbed in an unfamiliar community. Makhmalbaf has Angelopolous' confidence in allegory, a way of dramatising in mythic form life and displacement under a totalitarian regime, without in any way 'abstracting' the violence and pain.The empty landscapes suddenly being inexplicably over-run by faceless crowds also has the millenarial feel of Andersen's recent 'Songs from the second floor', or later Bunuel, from whom the theme of the journey, coming across strange, surreal strangers (eg the uncanny scene with the masked gardener whose son languishes in an Iraqi jail), or images such as the blackboard-hauling men like grounded birds watching blackbirds in the sky, and overhearing another, ominous, unseen flying object, derives. There are many, many ways of being political.Unlike these masters, however, who prefer irony and distant tableaux, Makhmalbaf, through restless handheld camerawork, gets right in between her characters and makes us feel for them.