Movies: Bahman Ghobadi

Kurdish-Iranian poet Sahel has just been released from a thirty-year prison sentence in Iran. Now the one thing keeping him going is the thought of finding his wife, who thinks he's been dead for over twenty years....

Akihiro, who lives in an old apartment building in Tokyo, makes songs and sings on the streets; Fei, a street musician who makes a living making a living by making the Iranian traditional instrument 'Daf', but does not neglect to play every night; A ...

Kurdish composer Boran is no longer able to see the ocean, obstructed by a new building, and a tragedy befalls him…...

Turtles Can Fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iraq border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall....

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result....

Mamo, an old and 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 ...

The first of four installments in the groundbreaking Heartbeat of the World anthology film series. Comprised of several short films by some of the world's most exciting directors, Words with Gods follows the theme of religion - specifically as it rel...

Iranian musicians Negar and Ashkan look for band members to play at a London concert ... and the visa that allows them to leave Tehran to do so....

Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offer...

During the war between Iran and Iraq, a group of Iranian Kurd musicians set off on an almost impossible mission. They will try to find Hanareh, a singer with a magic voice who crossed the border and may now be in danger in the Iraqi Kurdistan. As in ...

A police officer finds himself haunted by a traumatic childhood memory as he searches for a missing man in the rugged mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, in this striking feature debut by Batin Ghobadi....

An Iranian official (Reza Behboodi) tries to find husbands for a group of young Kurdish women who are threatening to kill themselves because of the scarcity of marriageable men Due to wars, bad economy, and politics....

This documentary shows us how a Daf elaborated. It's about a family that all their children are blinded and they're running their family business. They're making Dafs which is an Iranian hand percussion musical instrument and nowadays it's mostly pla...

After their father dies, a family of five children are forced to survive on their own in a Kurdish village on the border of Iran and Iraq....

For Nariman the pilot and Helly Luv, an aspiring singer, being Kurdish is not just an identity; it’s a full-time job. Nariman needs young recruits for his flying school—a goal made darkly comic since he just survived a plane crash—while the illustrio...

Nezhad is fourteen years old and both of his parents have passed away. He is forced to leave school and take care of the family. To earn a living, he decides to smuggle goods across the Iranian-Iraqi border with his mule. One day, however, the mule b...

The fate of thousands of people is unified under the tarpaulins of the refugee camps in Kobanê and in Shingal. Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi has given eight children the opportunity to use a camera to tell their own stories. Each film gives us a ...

Today Iranian cinema is one of the most highly regarded national cinemas in the world, regularly winning festival awards and critical acclaim for films which combine remarkable artistry and social relevance. Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution traces ...

During the 30 years of the Baath ruling under Sadam in Iraq thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shiites were either killed or disappeared. Around 182,000 people lost their lives when 4500 villages and townships were destroyed in Kirkuk, Soleimanieh, Dahouk ...