On Wednesday, April 24, I was able to go see part of the movie A Time for Drunken Horses in the Dunkin Donuts lounge. Although I wasn’t able to see the entire movie, what I saw was very interesting.

A Time for Drunken Horses is a Persian film about a boy Ayoub (almost my last name!) who becomes the head of his house and his younger brother is disabled and in need of surgery. Ayoub is an amazing older brother, regardless of his actual age. He attempts to raise enough money for his younger brother’s surgery by selling and smuggling tires but ultimately, he doesn’t reach his goal. His uncle then says that he will have the surgical expenses taken care of in exchange for Ayoub’s sister being married off. Ayoub, desperate, agrees, but when they get to the meeting, the groom’s mother won’t accept Ayoub’s disabled brother and instead gives them a mule for compensation. The movie ends with Ayoub and his brother crossing the Iran-Iraq border in hopes of a better life and medical attention even though they had lost the mule to smugglers and have no way of paying for the surgery.

Although the movie is fictional, it is hard to realize that things like this happen in real life. People live in such hardships, but when you’re surrounded by beauty like we are in America, you begin to think that the rest of the world must be like that and forget that people live in such brutal conditions. The movie showed a real life adaptation of so many struggles faced in third world countries. Even though I wasn’t able to see the entire movie, the parts that I did manage to see were remarkably done in a way that it didn’t seem dramatized.