The planet’s lone major Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi is also the most satirical and least self-conscious of the big Iranian New Wave voices, which is probably why in 10 years all five of his features have found American release. (In roughly the same span, contemporaries Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abba Kiarostami have virtually disappeared, their few films rarely seen.) But don't take this to mean that Ghobadi is a lightweight; his films, showing this week at the Walter Reade Theater as his latest opens, bristle with appalling realism and grim truth from one of the world’s most troubled landscapes. Among film artists of state-less nations—now there’s an idea for a retrospective—Ghobadi may be preeminent because his films are both accessible... More >>>