The Kurdish people know no national borders, so it is with full hearts-also with laptop, cell phone, and rooster-that a dozen Kurdish musicians, all sons of widely revered elder Mamo, attempt the trip from Iranian to Iraqi Kurdistan to perform, now that Saddam is gone. It is fitting that Bahman Ghobadi's (A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly) paean to the power and political vulnerability of music was made for the New Crowned Hope festival celebrating the spirit of Mozart. Here, everything lyrical is also practical-a de Chirico landscape reveals itself to be a simple graveyard-everything transcendent rooted on earth: the heart-stopping “celestial voice” of scores of women singing as one reveals the existence of some 1300 female singers exiled by the 1979 revolution. There is no separation between the artistic and the political, the magical and the musical on this marvelous, fraught journey, and a celestial voice does indeed carry Mamo home.

Half Moon is repeated on Saturday, October 20.