'Half Moon' tracks the travails of Kurdish musicians

The Kurds may not yet have a country, but as long as Bahman Ghobadi keeps making movies they have a national cinema. The Iranian-born director came to prominence with 2000's "A Time for Drunken Horses" and followed through with 2004's breathtaking "Turtles Can Fly," set in an Iraqi refugee camp on the eve of the US invasion.

With "Half Moon," Ghobadi's knack for turning statelessness into dark comic poetry continues. Like 2002's "Marooned in Iraq," this one has a musical bent -- the soundtrack is glorious -- and it follows the travels of a troupe that just wants a place where it can perform. If only it were that easy.

The central character is Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari) an aging musician and full-fledged pop star to the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Hired to play a concert in Iraq -- the first by Kurdish musicians since the fall of Saddam, he boasts -- Mamo decides to treat it as a farewell performance. He calls in his 10 musician sons to back him up. Some are eager, others reluctant, still others seem more frail than their father. Still, they dutifully file onto a borrowed bus driven by the boisterous Kako (Allah Morad Rashtiani), who's taking a leave from his duties officiating at cockfights.

"Half Moon" mines cultural dissonance for laughs: cellphones are packed next to ancient string instruments, aged villagers have Yahoo e-mail accounts, and when the troupe has to improvise another way across the border, one of Mamo's sons pulls out a laptop for a look at an online map (apparently the Wi-Fi is pretty good out there in the Zagros Mountains).

Yet all the high tech proves useless against the stubborn absurdities of governments. Since Iranian women aren't allowed to perform in public, Mamo tries sneaking a singer (Hedieh Tehrani) into Iraq, hiding her under the floorboards when the border police search the bus. Ghobadi's gift for shaggy magical realism is given full scope during a visit to a village of 1,330 exiled women singers: They stand on rooftops and serenade the musicians en masse. It's an unforgettable sight.

Another border crossing is foiled by a US firefight -- the soldiers are hidden, but the bullets are flying -- while a third attempt unravels when the woman performer lights out for parts unknown. "Wherever I go in Kurdistan, I will find instruments and a singer," insists Mamo, but he and we slowly realize that time is running out in every sense.

"Half Moon" takes a turn for the almost entirely metaphorical toward the end, with the appearance of the title character (Golshifteh Farahani), a stunningly beautiful young woman who vows to get Mamo to the stage on time. Is she an angel? Is she the soul of Kurdistan? While it's never clear, the movie suggests that even angels might have their limitations when it comes to earthly politics. "Half Moon" is a jaunty tune that turns minor-key. What begins as human comedy gradually unravels until it can only be called human tragedy.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.