Persian

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A sharp-edged look at people who live outside the constraints of Islamic law. In her fourth feature, director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad tells the tragic story of a love triangle. Afagh, an aging thief who has lost her beauty, is on the verge of losing her young lover, Adel. When Adel meets the beautiful Nargess, he decides to go straight, but honest work does not come easily, and he decides to go back to the old life for one last job. “Bani-Etemad pushes the Iranian censorship code to the limit, managing to make her outsider characters believable and moving” (Deborah Young, Variety).Read More »

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A great Iranian film , unfortunately unknown in and out of Iran, 23 April 2008
Author: Armand Erfanian from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Farar az Tale is an unknown film out of Iran. Even in Iran nobody remembers of this beautiful little masterpiece. There are so many successful visual and musical devices all along the film. The first one is just at the opening and before the opening credits. A man is dropped on the street. Another man tries to see if he is still alive. In finding that he is not, he turns his head towards Morteza (Behrooz Vosooghi) and by his eye expression lets him know that. All that in silent cinema and taking only 23 seconds. That is truly cinema, The art of image! Then the opening credits start, during which we see Morteza in prison, his moustaches are little by little growing. This is economy of great cinema. Using the time of the credits for letting us know that he is in prison and making us feel the length of his stay. The proper plot will begin now, when he comes out of prison and looks for his beloved woman Mehri (Nilufar). Another great moment of the film is when Morteza is looking for a solution to find somehow the 10 000 tomans that he needs to give to the man who married his beloved to get her divorce. Now wandering in the city and its outskirts he walks, stops and sits and looks at people working. Great music of Rubik Mansuri covers this sequence, and still shots or pans get dissolved to each other and gives us impression of boring time that Morteza is experiencing under the hot sun of the South. Iranian cinema is full of so great films… It is a pity that they don’t get any chance to be known… The actors, Behrooz Vosooghi, Davood Rashidi and Abbas Nazeri are absolutely great.Read More »

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Iran’s submission for the 90th Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film

Little Bahar lives a life spun from folklore and stories, always with her head in a book. But growing up in Yazd in the 1970s and ’80s, she’s at the centre of a country in turmoil: the Shah is overthrown, Ayatollah Khomeini rises to power, and the first shots are fired in a bitter and protracted war with Iraq. Over the span of several years, Bahar finds daydreaming in her own fantasy world is the only way she can make sense of the pain and suffering warring humans inflict on one another.Read More »

Imdb review
Life is Precious, 21 August 2000
Author: Martin Kohler ([email protected]) from Pretoria, South Africa
Having known someone who needed a kidney transplant, I was aware of the tremendous difficulty in finding a tissue matched donor organ. This film, which is about a heart transplant, brings out the desperation of the patient for whom there is no longer any other treatment option very clearly and realistically.

What I had not considered, and what this film made me aware of, is the extremely difficult position that the relatives of a deceased person are put in when they are requested to give permission for an organ donation. At this point they are already suffering from the shock and grief of having lost someone they loved, and this additional burden can test the limits of what they can bear.Read More »

Majid makes an 8-mm film with some poorly-lit sequences. To repeat the shots, Majid needs highly sensitive negatives and, therefore, some money. He comes up with the money by working as a coolie, but before buying the negative, a relative asks him to do something and Majid loses his money his money while doing it because of his shyness.Read More »

A poignant and poetic piece exploring the nature of memory, longing, loss, and the people and places that make us who we are. Shot entirely from the vantage point of Maryam, the invisible heroine in search of her father, the film recalls the visual sophistication of Vertov or Farsi’s compatriot Kiarostami. However, in the end, a unique voice rises to the top befitting this intimate and personal journey through the neighborhoods, alleyways, and people of Tehran.Read More »

Synopsis:
A taxi driver takes a young woman at a small Iranian hospital. As long as he gets there he realizes that he must take crucial decisions that may change his life.

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Too few risks have been taken in Iranian mainstream cinema to depict the oppression of Iranian women but Reza Mirkarimi’s film Emrooz (Today, 2014) subtly chronicles a day in the life of a pregnant single mother named Sedighe who desperately looks for support from a taxi driver named Younes. The film’s portrayal of the pregnant woman can be seen as evidence of the lack of social support for single mothers in Iran and how Iranian women have no legal right to defend their motherhood without the support of a child’s father.Read More »

In a small valley, riders pursue and kill a man. A horse thief, so his assassins claim. But for his ten year old son Issa, the disappearance of his father causes an avalanche of problems. With the family name stigmatized, Issa is bullied by the other children in the village. While his mother fights to clear her husbands name, Issa is left to his own devices. But unexpectedly, his solitude gives birth to his freedom, his real passion, horses.Read More »

Iranian Director Tamineh Milani was arrested and faced execution for making The Hidden Half, a film that had been approved by government censors. Milani has been released, but the charges have not been dropped.. A change in the political winds could land her back in jail.Read More »