Teachers walk the mountains of the Iran-Iraq border, blackboards
strapped to their backs, but no-one here seems to want their kind of
learning. For many, Blackboards was one of the best films of 2000, a
symbolic allegory worthy of Beckett. I'm not so sure. It's an important
work, with moments of visual beauty and dark humour, but never achieves
the tone of transcendence it strains for. Where The Apple transfigured
a real story through its compassion, Blackboards seems to use Kurdish
suffering rather coldly, clinically - especially compared to A Time
For Drunken Horses, a simpler but perhaps more effective film rooted in
the same setting.
