Mania Akbari

The liberation, exploitation, and oppression of Iran’s women, based on clips from films from the silent-film era up until the Revolution in 1979.Read More »

A film in several episodes with Bijan Daneshmand and Mania Akbari, exposing some of the issues of men and women within the confines of tradition and family life in Iran. Each episode displays a different form of male/female interaction. The placing of the actors in a moving vehicle or against a moving back drop signifies the movement of life despite all the obstacles in its way. The film deals with the roots of dependencies, limitations, power struggles and conflict that are the familiar stuff of life of couples in the Middle East.Read More »

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A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.

Jonathan Romney for Screen Daily wrote:
A defiantly no-frills exercise even by his ascetic standards, 10 is Abbas Kiarostami’s triumphant vindication of digital video’s potential to produce a kind of cinema that cannot be achieved by other means. This is screen minimalism at its most uncompromising: 10 sequences of varying length, shot with a locked-off DV camera, of people talking in a car, seemingly improvising around what may be a very loose script.Read More »

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Documentary where Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami reflects on his own film-making techniques, drawing from his own films – and 2001’s Ten in particular.

An IMDb reviewer wrote:
This isn’t so much a documentary as it is an 80 minute class with Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarstomi. Using his movie “Ten” as an example, he breaks down his theory of filmaking in 10 chapters, ranging from his preference of camera, to his take on character and directing.Read More »

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed. Yet, while he body shows the effects of the disease, Akbari is as tough, charismatic, and argumentative as in her previous screen appearances her luminous presence all the more alluring and precious as it becomes a sign of how fragile life itself is. Her cinematic language has been expanded and refined from the rigorous explorations of 20 Fingers, to take into account the unexpected aspects of facing simultaneously death and survival, social stigma and sympathy. Treading an elegant line between documentary and fiction, Akbari takes a daring look at complex social situations that arise in the face of mortality and emerges with a new zest for life.Read More »