On March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes dropped chemical bombs on Halabja, a town in the Kurdish region of Iraq, killing 5000 persons and injuring 10,000. Blackboards, the excellent second film by Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple), takes place in Iranian Kurdistan several years after the Halabja massacre.

In the first shot, a group of itinerant teachers walk into camera range from behind a hill, carrying blackboards on their backs. They’re looking for students. They hear helicopters, and to avoid being seen from above, they crouch by the side of a mountain and cover themselves with their blackboards. The teachers disperse, and the film follows two of them, who go a little way together and then separate.

One, Reeboir, attaches himself to a group of children carrying parcels of contraband from Iran into Iraq. The other, Said, agrees to help a band of old Kurdish men, refugees from Halabja, find their way back home. On the way, he marries the daughter of one of the men, a widow traveling with her young son.

The rhythm of the film is determined by sudden changes that the characters can’t control and can hardly comprehend. Threats, reported more than seen, affect people mysteriously, whipping them up into bird-like mass flights. Danger comes as if from nowhere, out of the sky or out of the landscape, like the mysterious cloud — not chemical, Said assures them — that swallows up the characters at the end of the film.

The blackboards serve different functions — as protection, as the screen that divides the couple in the marriage ritual, as the wall of a bridal chamber, as a splint for a broken leg. The blackboards also represent literate culture, which is rejected by all the people the teachers meet — all but one: a boy who wants to learn how to write his name. The other boys refuse to learn because, they say, mathematics is for the people who own the things they must carry.

One boy has a story about a rabbit, which he tells differently each time. For the rabbit, it’s always the same ending: it’s killed and eaten. But in one version, the narrator is denied his share of the meat; in another, he gets that share. For the boy, telling this story is as good as knowing how to read and write, as good as anything that’s not eating: it’s a way of taking revenge on physical existence.

The widow refuses to join in the lessons her new husband wants to teach her. She barely acknowledges him. He’s isolated by his ethics, his grades. "I’ll give you a zero," he threatens emptily, out of frustration. "A zero for your son. A zero for your father. I’ll give myself a zero for having been stupid enough to follow you." He turns and walks away from her, beaten by her silence. She calls him back: "Blackboard!" Then she says, in her longest speech: "My heart is like a train that stops at thousands of stations. In each station, someone gets on and another gets off. But there is only one person who never gets off, and he is my true love. That one person is my son." Her unexpected recourse to metaphor proves that she already possesses something of the culture that he thinks he’s bringing her. And her sole gift to her husband is to let him glimpse it, just this once.

Early in the film, Said meets an old man who has no use for literature, except for one thing: he has a letter that he believes is from his son. When Said starts to go, the old man calls him back and asks him to read him the letter. Said protests that it’s in a language he can’t read, but at the old man’s insistence, he pretends to read it anyway. The old man is hopeful at first; then his hope turns to resignation (with no change in his expression, because the resignation was there before), and out of politeness he agrees to pretend that he is indeed hearing the words of his son, a prisoner of war in Iraq.

This beautiful scene is emblematic of the film. Everyone is in the grasp of an illusion: home, love, borders, the written word. (The blackboards stand for all these things.) A study in absurdity and futility, Blackboards never stops loving, pitying, and forgiving its characters — always with detachment. The personality of the director is unmistakable: lucid, determined, passionate, ironic, tender.