Daf – Tambourine

Touch the sound, see the music! In a Kurdish mountain village near the Iraqi border, Faegh lives with his eleven children and three wives. The family manufactures traditional frame drums called dafs. Everyone mucks in according to his abilities, as their survival depends on the dafs. The children buy the wood and are helped by their father to prepare it for shaping into round frames. They then tan sheep hides for the skins of the tambourines. The camera follows the construction of the dafs through its various phases. Through the music, we enter the life of this unusual family. The daf holds a special place in the Kurdish community. It is played not only to celebrate the birth of a child but also when they are in mourning. Several of Faegh’s children have been blind from birth. The money from selling the dafs is to be spent on an eye operation for the youngest child. The mystic power of the daf’s sound is meant to help him recover from the operation. There are almost no words in Bahman Ghobadi’s film. The images and sounds interact freely in the telling of this story. (DOK.fest München)