The Kurds, a stateless population of over 40 million people, are mountain-dwellers. The mountains are an integral part of Kurdish identity, as well as a symbol of resistance. All the Mountains Give, one of a handful of documentary features screening at EIFF this year, is an intimate look at the lives of two Kurdish kolbars — the term for someone who smuggles basic goods through the Zagros mountains along the Iran-Iraq border. It’s dangerous, labour-intensive, and precarious work, earning the kolbars around $1 USD per kilo. Mules can be used to increase cargo and earnings, but this makes them more of a target for the border-patrolling Iranian Security Forces (ISF). According to the film, 200 kolbars die on the route every year — murdered by the ISF, blown up by one of the millions of undetonated landmines left over from the Iran-Iraq war, freezing with hypothermia, or falling to their death.
Over six years, director Arash Rakhsha embeds himself with kolbars Hamid and Yasser. At home in the mountainside community of Nodesheh, we learn more about their family lives. Hamid has a restaurant job lined up in Germany but no one wants to take over his caring responsibilities — he looks after his father whose memory and hearing are on the decline. He encourages his niece to use Sorani and Hewrami words instead of Persian ones, playing his part to keep the Kurdish languages alive.
Rakhsha, who also acts as editor and cinematographer, plunges you into the action with some adventurous camera placements. The lens bobs above and below water level in a river the kolbars have to swim in and, in a moment as grotesque as anything you’ll see in EIFF’s Midnight Madness strand, has viscera from the floor of the local slaughterhouse swept into it. Rakhsha’s film is also frequently visually jaw-dropping. The dirt tracks and rural mountain setting bring to mind Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, while scenes of the kolbars navigating the mountains with their cargo recall Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Worn down from toiling in the mountains, Hamid says that ‘Kolbari takes everything away from you’. Rakhsha’s debut is an empathetic and immersive piece of filmmaking, honouring the Kurdish struggle without romanticising kolbari as a way of life.
Words by Sophie Kindreich
