Daughter of noted Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (serving as his assistant on The Silence) , director Samira Makhmalbaf debuted successfully in 1998 with Sib (The Apple) but suffers a slump with her sophomoric Takhté siah (Blackboards) that would play better as a five-minute short. Why it won the 2000 Jury Prize at Cannes remains a mystery. At 85 minutes the inadvertent Kurdistan travelogue suffers from monotonous repetition without arriving anywhere. For a better cinematic experience of the Kurdish lifestyle near the Iranian/Iraqi border watch the far superior Time for Drunken Horses.

Like her father and like highly regarded Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf employs non-professional actors and shoots on location. Unlike her two directing mentors, she never gets beneath the skin of her actors—her cold, objective camera seems distant, even when shooting close-ups. Generic dialogue shouted by itinerant teachers desperately seeking students doesn't help—"Can you read and write?" Treating the unknown teachers like persistent tele-marketers, the local Kurds hide from them, ignore them, or turn them down flatly.

After a promising start, surrealistically following a group of blackboard toting teachers trudging up the barren rocky plateau, the movie flounders exhausting the audience by taking it on the tedious 90 minute trek into the banal. For background information, Makhmalbaf decides the audiences needs only scant notes�that it's enough to merely know these itinerant teachers are having difficulty finding jobs and face suspicion from the locals, who are apparently attempting to sneak supplies across the heavily guarded border (although travelling on graded roads seems like a certain way to be detected).

Early on the film follows two of the teachers—Said (Said Mohamed) and Reeboir (Bahman Gobadi)—as they break from the herd and take off on their own. Said runs into a group of Kurdish nomads fleeing their border city after being attacked with Iraqi chemical warfare. They seek their homeland and offer to pay Said to take them there. Desperate for students, Said even marries a single mother in order to have someone obligated to him. She has an ailing father, who hasn't urinated for three days, and a small son with a mind of his own.

A contrasting situation evolves with Reeboir, who ends up accompanying teenage boys who refer to themselves as "mules," with their backpacks of military supplies. They find his teaching irrelevant, but are more accepting of his presence after he helps an injured comrade. But what good is reading and writing when your lifestyle demands acting like a pack mule?

Like most minimalist Iranian films, not much happens—continual nomadic scenes along dusty paths and rugged roads with teachers searching for students, people trying to assist the old man to urinate, and itinerate teaching drills that are often ignored. Makhmalbaf keeps the film low budget without showing any real battle scenes. The first encounter with the enemy is amusing, as the teachers all shield themselves collectively underneath their blackboards—and then cover one side of the board with mud for future camouflage. Later conflicts play like pantomime: the locals start running from the unseen enemy (at least three separate times). Sometimes pop gun rifle fire is heard in the distance, but other times nothing but silence as the untrained ensemble cast attempts to act panic stricken—which is a problem, because they are obviously acting and don't demonstrate the same kind of realistic urgency that Kiarostami shows in his films.

The main problem lies with its flat characters that we really know very little about. By the end we know little more about Said and Reeboir than we know at the beginning—they are itinerant teachers scratching to make a subsistence living in harsh conditions. Those who want to look globally at their unrealistic ideals of educating the local Kurds to improve their lives may discern some substance here, considering the Kurds' plight and how simplisticly surreal it is to think they will improve their lives by education. Just how much will reading and writing do when landmines are planted in your backyard, chemical weapons are being discharged, and you can't even take a decent whiz? Blackboards does paint some memorable images in that light, but Makhmalbaf keeps her distance from the characters. And that's where the film falls far short of its potential.