When Samira Makhmalbaf, age 17, made The Apple, a story of Tehran twin sisters held captive at home by their fiercely patriarchal dad, skeptics speculated that her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, had directed the precocious documentary. The famous Iranian filmmaker is credited with the story, and with the editing, so wasn’t The Apple in truth a film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf?

It wasn’t, and neither is Blackboards, talented Samira’s second picture, a narrative feature, which premiered at Cannes in 2000, when the director was 20, and which will be playing this weekend at the Brattle Theatre and all week in the Coolidge Corner’s screening room. Mohsen is credited as executive producer, co-screenwriter, and editor. But once again, Samira is the auteur, the person who stood behind the camera during the grueling, dangerous shoot in the high mountains of Kurdistan, along the Iran-Iraq border. That’s where the once-warring (1980-’88) countries clashed by night, and where Saddam Hussein tried to destroy the Kurd populace with ghastly chemical weapons. For the three months it took to film Blackboards, Samira was alone there. Without the Makhmalbaf family. Without even a phone line to Tehran.

"I was traveling around Iran searching for a story and location that would really move me," she explained at Cannes, when Blackboards played in Official Competition. "During a stay in Kurdistan with my father, we found little topics, little stories, and I preferred this story: about the journey of teachers with blackboards on their backs as they traveled Kurdistan. My father gave me the outline of the story, and I drew up the screenplay as we went along."

The Kurdish-speaking characters in Makhmalbaf’s movie — impoverished teachers and youthful smugglers — shuttle back and forth between Iran and Iraq, with helicopters hovering overhead. Is it intentional that, in certain scenes, it’s difficult to identify the nationality of those plaguing the Kurds?

"I didn’t want to be too specific about any country or region," she agreed. "It’s a rather surrealistic film, with the bombings as a bad dream, a nightmare, I imagined in my head. So it is hard to tell who is responsible, Iraq or Iran. But the problem isn’t just war between Iran and Iraq. It goes back to former kings and former politicians. Today we have inherited their legacy.

"The issues of smuggling, of people without homes, I could have made in other Iranian provinces. However, I couldn’t make a film about Kurdistan without talking about chemical bombings, the human side of war. I was obliged to go every day with the cast two hours to the frontier. My crew would say, ‘We don’t want to go to the Iraqi border. We can shoot here.’ But I wanted to be impregnated by the energy of a border city, Halabja, which had been bombed in chemical warfare."

Many of those in the cast are citizenry from Halabja; one actor is a professional, Behnaz Jafari, the sole female in Blackboards. Makhmalbaf explained, "I liked the contrast between one woman and a whole group of men. Since women are so ignored in Iran, I wanted to give special value to this woman character, a young widow with a child. One day, I saw a woman going from one village to another, depressed because she had lost her husband, carrying water in a kettle. My actress was inspired by this woman, who was a bit deranged.

"Originally, an actor was cast as the primary teacher. One day he talked to me: could I fire him? The person who now plays the part [Said Mohamadi] came to me spontaneously. For the role of the father, I opted for a well-known Iranian professional. As others were natural, he stood out. He was too exaggerated. I found myself with a dilemma. How to blend his acting with the others? He solved the problem himself: ‘I’m going. Take someone else.’ I chose instead this old man. His skin, his pain, showed all the right information.

"Using such non-actors was both difficult and easy. It was easy in that the people were not as complicated as urban actors. They knew nothing about the sixth art. Many had seen no films at all. Less than a year ago, they still had no electricity.

"It was difficult because they would stop working for prayers, for local feasts. I told them they couldn’t, they wouldn’t listen to me. In order to encourage them, I had to set an example. I had to go into icy waters, and I climbed mountains, but not out of machismo. They would do it if I, a woman, did it first."

A postscript: on December 5 the New York Times announced that Makhmalbaf, who’ll be 23 next month, is directing "the first feature film to be made in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban." The untitled work is "a story of a women’s dreams in a changing society."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com