The Immediate Family

The Northern Iran winters are so cold that the Kurdish smugglers who live there feed their mules alcohol so that they will carry loads over the mountain passes. In this world of high-risk border crossings and death by land mine, a fatherless young boy named Ayoub scrapes out a living doing odd tasks, supporting his sisters and crippled brother. This may seem like a recipe for seventy-seven minutes of misery, but the director Bahman Ghobadi's affection for his subjects gives the film a certain lightness. He takes the raw materials of his homeland-the harsh landscape, communal rooms, and lambent-eyed children-and fashions a visual poem. Ghobadi documents his subjects without intruding, and the results are quietly enthralling.

Early champions of Country Music - The Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, the Massey Family, Jimmie Rodgers and many more - have been painstakingly remastered using a mix of analog and digital technology for a hybrid sound that is simultaneously contemporary, immediate but still completely true-to-form.