'Blackboards'
Head of the class

DISPLACED, ANCIENT Kurds shuffle through mountains trying to get home to die. Children snake across the same shaky turf with backbreaking loads of contraband to carry across the Iran-Iraq border. And another set of nomads, a group of strangely upbeat teachers, trudges up the paths as well, comically carting gigantic blackboards on their backs, peddling the one thing these elderly people and endangered kids really don't need: instruction in reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. A tragicomic poem to the people who struggle to get through the day while war tears their worlds apart, this is one of the best pieces to emerge from the house of Makhmalbaf – a family, a film school, and an industry built on the prolific works of Mohsen, his wife, Marziyeh, son Maysam, 21, and daughters Hana, 14, and Blackboards director Samira, 22 (who made the astute art film The Apple at age 17). The film's teachers, good-natured salesmen run amok, are a sight as picturesque as any in the Makhmalbaf (father or daughter) oeuvre, particularly when the threatening sounds of a helicopter have them flocking together – spreading their blackboards like wings, for protection. Of course, the blackboards prove pretty much useless as a pedagogical tool, but they are valuable in a variety of other ways: as dowry, camouflage, stretcher, splint, bomb shelter. Two of the teachers (Reeboir, played by Bahman Ghobadi, the Iranian Kurdish director of similarly themed A Time for Drunken Horses; and Said, played by Said Mohamadi) find ways to make themselves useful as well, while continuing to shout their lessons oblivous to whether or not anyone is listening. Said picks up a wife along the way, but gives her a "zero" when she refuses to repeat the phrase he's etched on his board. Indeterminate bombs shrink their newlywed dispute to size, while the words she won't speak, "I love you," remain on the board, unerased, as the film's final, elegiac note to those who won't give up. (Susan Gerhard)