Blackboards
2000 film by Samira Makhmalbaf

Blackboards (Persian: تخته سیاه, Takhté siah; Kurdish: تەختێ رەش, romanized: Textê Reş) is a 2000 Iranian film directed by Samira Makhmalbaf. It focuses on a group of Kurdish refugees after the chemical bombing of Halabja by Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War. The screenplay was co-written by Makhmalbaf with her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The dialogue is entirely in Kurdish. Makhmalbaf describes it as "something between reality and fiction. Smuggling, being homeless, and people's efforts to survive are all part of reality... the film, as a whole, is a metaphor."
The film was an international co-production of the Makhmalbaf Productions of Iran, the Italian companies Fabrica and Rai Cinema, and the Japanese company T-Mark.
Plot
Following a bombing in Iranian Kurdistan, schoolteachers wander from village to village in search of students.
One of them comes across a group of teenagers working as "mules," smuggling goods across the border into Iraq. Despite the teachers' efforts, none of them is interested in learning—except for the young Rêbwar.
The public source identifies “Blackboards” as 2000 film by Samira Makhmalbaf. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Blackboards, film and Samira.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2399461. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blackboards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.