Tag: Iran

A Childless Village (Sonsuz)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Twenty years ago, Kazem made a film about the village’s women being unable to bear children. As a result, they beat him up. And many of the men in the village divorced them only to feel guilty and remarry them some three times. Now he wants to make another film because the problem may lie not with the women, but the men. Who, reckons the narrator, are equally likely to beat him up. A visiting lady doctor, generally referred to by the locals as Miss Doctor, hopes to run tests on the villagers and establish the cause of childlessness.

Moslem, who is also the narrator, wants to learn how to be a director – and to just be in the film. He claims that all the women in the village are related to him, so he’ll have no problem getting them to talk on camera. But, of course, it doesn’t work out that way.

An hilarious running gag has people going up to local sound recordist Samad and asking him this or that while he’s trying to record sound. Director Jamali has a lot of fun with elements such as this – for instance, Moslem proudly proclaiming that he’ll use the clapper board so professionally that no-one will need to do any writing. Or tossing leaves onto a patch of ground in an unsolicited attempt to make the shot look more beautiful for the camera.

“When you show up,” one of the women tells Moslem, “there’s always someone dead or something wrong.”

Another episode has one of the oldest women in the village – Granny Nazi – about to give birth. Kazem wants to film her, but her menfolk are unwilling. Eventually a compromise of sorts is reached and Samad, having agreed to record sound after the birth, promptly installs himself on the roof to record the event itself.

The film abounds with gags about the art of filmmaking. Kazem screens a silent film for the men of the village, but they want to know why it has no sound. Elsewhere, one man wants to be recorded in sound only so his relative won’t know from whom the testimony comes. So Moslem borrows a frosted window pane from a local house to use to blur the on camera image while the man is being filmed. Only, he can’t resist moving the glass so that the camera glimpses the man’s face.

Like Italian documentary The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw, 2020), in which the old men of the village prove so incredibly watchable on camera, both Moslem and, to a lesser extent, Kazem, bring an irrepressible humour to the film. Unlike that film, this one isn’t a real documentary so much as a film about three characters making one. Its heart is in absolutely the right place, though, with its story about a group of women who got a raw deal as a result of patriarchal prejudice that blamed them for infertility that turns out not to be their fault but the men’s.

Audiences will be drawn to it not because of what it has to say about male bias and injustice but rather because of the humour with which it achieves this. A quiet, gentle and genuinely funny little film.

A Childless Village premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It then shows at the 2nd Red Sea International Film Festival.

The Enemies (Doshmanan)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A puzzling character study trafficking in loneliness, meanness and sadness, The Enemies is both a confounding and intriguing experience. Telling the story of a Zohreh (Roya Afshar) a 60-year-old Iranian woman in Tehran disliked by her family and hated by her neighbours, it asks deep questions of its central character without ever compromising on its singular vision.

Zohreh’s son Sharab, a drug addict, is missing. Her husband is supposedly working by the Caspian Sea. She lives with her daughter, a flight attendant, and her mother, critical in both health and temperament, never wasting a moment in telling Zohreh she has ruined her life.

In fact, Zohreh takes no interest in matters of family, doting upon her many cats and spending her free time stealing supermarket sweets and handing them out to schoolchildren instead. Meanwhile, someone has been sending the rest of the apartment block’s letters accusing Zohreh of terrible things. But is there more to these letters than initially supposed?

In describing this film I’ve had to deliberately misrepresent the plot. To describe the plot entirely accurately would be to give away some of its keenest pleasures. In this film, nearly everything you learn at the start is something of a misnomer, upending your expectations throughout. It’s best experiencing the film knowing as few twists and turns as possible, so you can guess alongside the characters as to what is actually going on.

Is she acting so oddly because her son has gone missing? Or is there something much deeper at the heart of The Enemies? An exciting tension runs throughout the movie, the character of Zohreh seemingly able to move in any direction. Credit must go to the brilliant Roya Afshar, who never gives too much away, suggesting huge amounts of sadness and even mischievousness behind her large eyes.

With many assistant directing credits to his name, this is Ali Derakhshandeh’s first time directing a feature fiction film. His enigmatic story is embedded within a measured and melancholic style, making use of long takes, slow pans and careful blocking. We are not told what to think or feel, having to engage critically into figuring out Zohreh’s inner-state.

This remove in both style and content makes the film difficult for emotional investment, even when it occasionally breaks from its alienating style and gives us brief glimpses into the real Zohreh. While individual scenes benefit from fine acting that combines awkwardness and offence in equal measure, it’s hard to say what Zohreh’s inner-conflict and relation to the outside world really is.

Perhaps it’s a metaphor for the status of women in Iran. With multiple references to the state of the country as well as video calls with relatives having a seemingly better life abroad, the film critiques the way Iranian society seems to pigeonhole and blame women for things outside of their control. Her flight attendant daughter, flitting between Iran and the wider world, is between both worlds, while her mother, in her last days, is fixed to the streets and culture of Tehran. Meanwhile drug dealers run rampant just outside the flat window; something is rotten all right, but the ultimate meaning remains frustratingly elusive.

The Enemies plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Filmfarsi

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Iranian cinema can be as well defined by what it doesn’t show as by what it does. Women’s hair is never seen, characters never drink and sex is never depicted. Filmmakers, like Jafar Panahi (still technically under house arrest), must find novel ways to skirt restrictions to say what they want about life and society. What’s truly incredible is that despite these restrictions, Iran can lay claim to one of the richest cinematic cultures in the world.

Style follows form, the government’s rigid censorship paradoxically leading to some remarkably powerful works. Could the metafictional stylings of Abbas Kiarostami or the tightly wound social dramas of Asghar Farhadi have come out of a more liberated society? Perhaps I have been thinking about it all wrong. As the documentary Filmfarsi shows — surveying popular Iranian cinema up until the Islamic revolution of 1979 — Iranian cinema has always been characterised by wild invention, improvising with what you have and melding genres together.

Documentarian Ehsan Khoshbakht, narrating with the air of a seasoned university professor, calmly takes us into the world of Filmfarsi, cheap and dirty pre-revolutionary cinema revealing a completely different side of Iran. These are brazen, erratic works, seemingly shot on the fly and infused with sex, alcoholism, and violence. Plot-lines are often ripped off from Hollywood works, interspersed with dance scenes that act like a cross between Egyptian dance and Bollywood musicals.

Yet none of these Filmfarsi works, converted from rare VHS rips, are allowed to be screened in Iran; considered to be totally antithetical to the Islamic way of life. After the revolution, cinema halls were burned down and actors and filmmakers were forced into exile (although paradoxically some, like Kiarostami, went on to become household names in Iran). This gives Filmfarsi a great feeling of poignancy, both for a lost way of Iranian life, and the cinematic styles that went with it.

While it’s easy to think of cinema, a relatively recent invention, as an art-form that can easily be preserved, the reality is far more porous. Disintegrating film footage, producer meddling, endless rights battles and overall lack of care has led to many great masterpieces being either partially or completely lost. How much great Iranian cinema is still out there, yet to be (re)discovered or never to be found again?

When it comes to understanding the soul of nations, film becomes a highly useful tool; capturing a people’s attitudes, paradoxes and ways of life. Therefore, whether it’s the irreverent comedies from the Soviet Union, or Pre-Code Cinema of the USA, preservation of the past becomes both a means to fight against prejudice and to peek into alternative futures. By ripping up everything you thought you knew about both Iran — one of the most misunderstood nations on earth — and the Iranian cinematic tradition, Filmfarsi is yet another reminder to look beyond stereotypes to the far messier truth underneath. Khoshbakht’s approach is mostly academic, offering only a couple of personal anecdotes about his relation to the material. While a few more personal anecdotes may have imbued the film with even more melancholy, his love for the contradictions of the genre runs strongly throughout. Essential for lovers of Iranian cinema.

FilmFarsi premieres at the Cambridge Film Festival, which takes place between October 17th and 24th.