Uncertified, 114mins

Women singers – 1,334 of them – are exiled to an ancient mountaintop village in Half Moon, the latest film by the Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi. Their mournful keen drifts on the desert winds, their voices imprisoned behind stone walls to prevent them from being heard by men. They line the sinuous little cobbled alleys, beating a rhythm on hand drums to accompany an ethereal chant.

It’s a striking image, rooted in symbolism rather than fact, and it characterises a new approach for Ghobadi. This film is rich with fantastic imagery; the dirty reality of life for the Kurdish people is ornamented with something approaching magical realism. As with all of Ghobadi’s elegies for his embattled people, death is central to this movie. But Half Moon is also driven by music which, as Ghobadi tells it, is for the Kurds as vital a force as life itself.

In the past, in films such as The Time of Drunken Horses and Turtles Can Fly, Ghobadi has relied on the stark realities of survival in the crossfire of endless wars and a poverty so crushingly brutal that staying alive from day to day is its own battle. In Drunken Horses, an orphaned 12-year-old is forced to brave landmines and hypothermia on the smuggling route that killed his father to provide for his younger siblings. In Turtles, toddlers play with shell casings and mortar fragments in the absence of toys; a girl barely out of childhood has a baby after being raped by soldiers. It’s wretchedly affecting, intended to drive home a message. But with Half Moon, Ghobadi is more concerned with telling us about the Kurdish people themselves, rather than their plight.

An exuberant, unconventional road movie, it tells of Mamo, an elderly musician who has achieved great renown and respect in his latter years. After months of waiting, Mamo has finally been granted permission to play a concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. But first he has to gather his ten sons, who double as his backing band, and load them onto a ramshackle bus that also plays host to the driver’s favourite chicken.

It has been 35 years since Mamo, an Iranian Kurd, has been allowed to play freely in Iraqi Kurdistan – he’s determined to make the trip despite the premonition of one of his sons that tragedy awaits before the next full moon. To complicate matters, Mamo is convinced that the crowning glory of his concert can be provided only by the celestial voice of a woman called Hesho, exiled in the mountains with all the other women singers. But this plan is fraught with difficulties – not only are women forbidden from singing in front of men, Hesho must also hide in a secret compartment in the bus to avoid arrest when the police search the vehicle with their “women-sniffing dogs”.

With its rich symbolism, its musical pulse and its anarchic, chaotic humour – not to mention all the goats and chickens – the film feels closer in spirit to the riotous cinema of the Bosnian director Emir Kusturica than to the films of Ghobadi’s Iranian compatriots. It should be said that the comedy, to put it kindly, is probably rather culturally specific, relying as it does predominantly on chubby men shouting and getting flustered. But the savage drama of the landscape, the indomitable optimism of the people and the passion of the ubiquitous music – almost every character is a musician – is universal in its appeal. The release of Gobadi’s fourth feature film is timely, providing a face and a voice for a people lately known best as the targets of a Turkish bombing campaign.

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