AN UNFORGETTABLE KURDISH STORY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THE KURDISH filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi made an impressive feature debut with the tragic tale of child smugglers ``A Time for Drunken Horses.'' Events in his second movie, ``Marooned in Iraq,'' are even more heart-rending.

Yet the new piece also works a great deal more into the proceedings: humor, mesmerizing musical performances, complex sexual politics and an even richer, ethnographic portrayal of life on both sides of the rugged Iran-Iraq border. The expert tonal juggling proves a marked advance for an already top-notch talent.

Another entry on the long list of superb humanist films from Iran, ``Marooned'' has a Kurdish theme that also could make it the inspiration for a whole new ethnic cinema from recently liberated Iraqi Kurdistan (it has been, reportedly, the first movie shown in the country since the war).

Filmed in Iran, ``Marooned'' devastatingly presents the case for Saddam's ouster, regardless of how much a threat he may or may not have been to anyone beyond his borders. Although the film seems to reference the Baghdad regime's genocidal air and chemical assaults against the Kurdish minority following the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, Ghobadi insists that his movie's action takes place following the first Gulf War. That's when Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were supposedly destroyed and America and Britain were supposed to be protecting the Kurds from the air.

Accurate or not in the strict historical sense, the film's details are so sadly specific that exact dates don't really matter. The suffering of this nationless people (numbering 20 million or so, the world's largest such group) has been going on long enough to seem eternal.

So has their resilience. That - in all of its cranky, often absurdly funny way - is what Ghobadi means to celebrate.

Employing mostly amateur actors, the film follows the cockeyed but increasingly symbolic and moving quest of an elderly local singing star, Mirza (Shahab Ebrahimi), and his two adult musician sons Barat (Faegh Mohammadi) and Audeh (Allah-Morad Rashtian). The Iran-based patriarch receives a vague but urgent request for help from an ex-wife, the singer Hanareh, who ran off to Iraq with a bandmate 23 years earlier (the same year, significantly, that Islamic fundamentalists took control of Iran and banned women from singing publicly).

With Saddam's murderers running riot on the other side of the border, thousands of refugees are fleeing east. And, truth be told, Mirza still loves Hanareh, though he can't tell either son that (they had different mothers, and consider the runaway a family shame). Still, cool bachelor Barat (he always wears shades and rides a motorbike) and constantly complaining Audeh (he has seven wives and 13 daughters ... and is determined not to leave women alone until one provides him with a son) reluctantly accompany their father on his increasingly frustrating mission.

Along the way, the three men encounter ineffectual authorities, black marketeers, romantic brigands, bandits, hordes of war orphans and a few dedicated caretakers. As the terrain grows less hospitable, the snows deeper and abandoned Iraqi villages further damaged, the contentious musicians lose just about everything. And that includes unexamined male attitudes. In each guy's case, that presents a possibility for enlightened action that just may snatch personal redemption from the jaws of harrowing atrocity.

A master at framing figures in landscape, Ghobadi has an awe-inspiring way of finding the right mountain crag or engulfing snowfield against which to set such withering tableaux as the digging up of mass graves or an endless funeral procession made up entirely of women - all of them widows and now without sons.

Yet these David Lean-quality long shots would mean little had Ghobadi not carefully established particular human dimensions that lend the larger catastrophes full emotional weight. When we finally find out what Saddam's chemical weapons did to those who survived them, it comes as close to a sense of personal loss as any movie has ever approximated. It's too big a crime to fully comprehend and too painful a sorrow to assess other than quietly.

And then, we have to move on.

MAROONED IN IRAQ - Four stars

(Not rated: violence, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Shahab Ebrahimi, Faegh Mohammadi, Allah-Morad Rashtian, Rojan Hosseini, Saeed Mohammadi.

Director: Bahman Ghobadi.

Running time: 1 hr. 37 min.

Playing: Town Center, Encino; Glendale Cinemas, Glendale; Music Hall, Beverly Hills; University Town Center, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Marvelously observant examination of ethnic, familial, sexual and political tensions.