Iran

Reza Motori, who has feigned madness, escapes from an asylum and robs a factory, with the aid of a friend. Afterwards, a young writer, who looks exactly like Reza, visits the asylum in order to write about inmates. There he is mistaken for Reza and detained. Meanwhile, Reza assumes the identity of the writer. Reza falls in love with the writer’s fiancée and decides to give up the money he has stolen from the factory, but his friends prevent him from doing so. Received the best actor and best music prizes at the Third Iranian National Film Festival “Sepas” in 1971. Read More »

The Salesman tells the story of a young couple Emad and Rana who play the lead roles in a local rendition of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Meanwhile, their personal relationship takes a hit after moving into a house that was previously inhabited by a woman who allegedly pursued a career in prostitution.Read More »

Quote:
One of my most anticipated films at last year’s Toronto Film Festival was Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly. Ghobadi had directed A Time for Drunken Horses, a devastating film about Kurdish children on the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq border. I knew that Turtles Can Fly was going to shift the focus over to the Iraqi side just before the U.S. invasion, and I was more than curious to see how he’d handle the political angle.Read More »

Iranian director Ali Reza Amini’s Namehay Bad (Letters in the Wind) is set in the familiar world of basic training. A group of uneducated cadets is abused, toughened up, and shaped by military men. Many of the young men have to make difficult adjustments to this new life. When one of the men gets the opportunity to visit Teheran, the others give him messages that they want him to deliver to their families. Letters in the Wind was screened at the Toronto Film Festival.Read More »

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Hailed as one of the masterpieces of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, Bashu, the Little Stranger opens during an Iraqi air-raid on a small Iranian village bordering the war-front in Khuzestan. When 10-year old Bashu’s loses his home and his entire family in the raid he takes refuge in a truck that unexpectedly drives north, close to the Russian border. There he is assumed to be ‘wild’ because of his incomprehensible dialect and dark skin; only Nai, a mother of two whose husband is away for work, takes pity on him. Soon she and Bashu weave a relationship strong enough that Bashu’s traumatic experience with the war makes way for hope and trust.Read More »

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A look at the lives of 3 well-off Iranian couples who are ostensibly living an idyllic life and are going to have a get-together for a birthday party. Each couple bearing their own sordid secrets attend the party to find out what follows on the hills of the cold welcome of their host.Read More »

Quote:
Nasrin wants to divorce her husband, but knows she won’t be able to get custody of her six-year-old daughter if she does. So, unbeknown to her husband, she and her daughter move to another part of town where Nasrin finds a job at a hospital crèche. One day her husband catches up with her and their lives take an unexpected turn.Read More »

Synopsis:
Makhmalbaf puts an advertisement in the papers calling for an open casting for his next movie. However when hundreds of people show up, he decides to make a movie about the casting and the screen tests of the would-be actors.

Review:
A seminal film for Makhmalbaf (it laid the foundations for Moment of Innocence) and a key film for Iran’s new cinema. In 1994, to celebrate the medium’s upcoming centenary, Makhmalbaf placed an ad for aspiring movie actors in a newspaper. Five thousand people of all ages showed up (this opens with scenes of the riot) and the resulting film is a highly selective compilation of episodes from the screen tests. It packs a lot into 70 minutes. It’s a spot-sample of Iranian society in 1994, noting the rise of assertive young women. There’s a wry perspective on Khomeini’s revolution (note the man who trades on his prison friendship with Makhmalbaf to ask favours for his sons). There are reflections on cinephilia, from the idiots who think they look like Hollywood stars or want to show off their macho gunplay to the would-be actor who pretends to be blind and claims to be able to ‘feel’ the films he sits through. And there’s Makhmalbaf deconstructing the film-making process: acting the directorial bully, then watching others (women!) emulate his bullying. Read More »

تجربه

A fourteen-year-old boy is employed as general assistant in a photographer’s studio, where he is also allowed to sleep. From afar, he is in love with a girl who lives in a wealthy district. One morning, he comes to offer his services at the girl’s parents’ house. There seems to be a ray of hope. But that evening the answer is negative, and final… A sort of adolescent double of the young boy in Zang-e Tafrih , the young Mamad of Tadjrebeh has a different obsession: rather than his football, he is attached here to the face of a girl, the painful result of love at first sight. Rootless and homeless, Mamad is a body borne on the flux of the town, his nameless and aimless anguish soothed by a ride round the courtyard on his elder brother’s moped or the half-bare waist of a woman followed in the crowd… Counters, doors and windows punctuate this film of absence, as well as images: the photographs which the apprentice files and stamps, mirrors of elsewhere, of another possible world.Read More »