Offsite
Maria Hernandez Park
Handball Court
Brooklyn, NY 11237
May 29, 2025 at 7:30 pm
Half Moon
Free Outdoor Screening at Maria Hernandez Park
UnionDocs is headed outside for May and June to take advantage of one of our favorite city offerings: the ready-made cinemas of the handball courts in our public parks. It’s a long-standing UNDO tradition to project bold visions, reflections, and possibilities onto the walls of the city’s handball courts, transforming them into open-air theaters. This summer, we’re thrilled to continue that tradition with ReadyMade Cinemas, a slate of programs that are free and open to all.
For this edition, we’re teaming up with our longtime collaborators at ArteEast and the incredible Brooklyn Maqam for a night of live music and cinema rooted in the rich sonic traditions of the SWANA region. As part of the second annual New York Oud Festival, we’re honored to host a live musical performance followed by a special screening of Bahman Ghobadi’s Half Moon.
The evening begins with a performance by a featured artist from the Oud Festival, organized by Brooklyn Maqam—a collective dedicated to celebrating, preserving, and supporting new community-rooted SWANA musical traditions by bringing together established and emerging musicians, music learners, and audiences through concerts, jams, workshops, and more.
Following the performance, we’ll screen Half Moon, the lyrical, darkly comedic road film by Bahman Ghobadi. Set against the mountainous borderlands of Iran and Iraq, Half Moon follows Mamo, an aging Kurdish musician determined to perform one final concert across the border. Accompanied by his ten sons and a reluctant bus driver, Mamo’s journey unfolds with mythic undertones—full of interruptions, premonitions, and the haunting presence of forbidden voices. As he insists on including Hesho, a female singer whose participation puts the entire voyage at risk, the film raises questions about visibility, voice, and the stubborn pursuit of beauty in the face of repression.
Together, the performance and film trace sonic geographies shaped by resilience and longing—reminding us of music’s role in not only expressing culture, but in sustaining it.
This event is free and open to all, inviting the UNDO community, our neighbors, passersby, film lovers, and anyone curious to join for a festive evening under the stars, come through!
Program
Half Moon by Bahman Ghobadi
107 min, 2006, Iran, 35mm, Color, Kurdish and Persian with English subtitles.
The renowned Iranian musician Mamo has been banned from performing as part of Saddam Hussein’s suppression of Kurdish culture. In the wake of Hussein’s fall from power, Mamo assembles his ten sons, who are also his musicians, as well as the legendary singer Hesho. Together they embark on a road trip from Iranian Kurdistan to the territory of Iraqi Kurdistan to perform for the newly established Kurdistan Regional Government. As a female musician travelling with a group of men, Hesho must be smuggled across the border from Iran to Iraq where combat is not yet over.
Bios
Bahman Ghobadi was born in 1969 in Baneh, in the province of Iranian Kurdistan, near the Iran-Iraq border. Shortly after graduating from the National Audiovisual School, he made his first short, immediately acclaimed by the local critics. One of these short films, “Life in Fog” (1999) is even considered as the most famous short ever made in Iran. This success allowed Bahman Ghobadi to make several feature films, the best known being his first, “A Time for Drunken Horses” (2000), the first Kurd film in the history of Iran. This film and all the the others made by Ghobadi were hits in the festival circuit, garnered dozens of awards but were little seen or not seen at all in his native country. His last movie to date, filmed without official permit, rapidly and feverishly, “No One Knows About Persian Cats” (2009) is a remarkable semi-documentary about underground indie music in Tehran.
Presented With
