Iranian films at 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival

 

Founded in 1957, the San Francisco International Film Festival is the longest-running film festival in the Americas, featuring some 150 films and live events with more than 100 filmmakers.

This year there are three Iranian films participating in the festival; Nader Takmil Homayoun’s TEHROUN, Mohammad Rasoulof’s  THE WHITE MEADOWS, and  Babak Jalali’s FRONTIER BLUES.

 

 

 

 

THE WHITE MEADOWS

Mohammad Rasoulof s The White Meadows is a mesmeric, discomforting journey – punctuated by enigmatic motifs and metaphors – through a nightmarish bleached-white landscape of barren salt marshes. Defying any genre, the fable-like tale follows the odyssey of a man who sets out by boat to collect the tears of the inhabitants scattered across an archipelago of stark, inhospitable islands on a nameless sea.

On March 2, 2010, Mohammad Rasoulof was arrested in Iran along with filmmaker Jafar Panahi and 14 others as part of the crackdown in response to post-election disputes.

 

 

FRONTIER BLUES

Frontier Blues takes place on Iran’s northern frontier with Turkmenistan. It consists of 4 stories. Alam is a 28 year-old Turkmen man who lives with his father and works in a chicken farm. He is teaching himself English in order to marry a girl called Ana and take her to Baku. Hassan is a 28 year-old Persian man who lives with his uncle. His only companions are his pet donkey and tape player.

Kazem, is Hassan’s uncle and he owns a clothing store but the clothes he tries to sell never seem to fit anyone.

A 55 year-old Turkmen minstrel is the subject of a book of photography by a photographer from Tehran. His wife was stolen by a Sheppard in a green Mercedes many years ago.

 

 

Related articles

• Peter Bradshaw on Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof (guardian.co.uk)
• Sundance Gets a Taste of Iranian Politics (carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Standing strong (boston.com)
• The Circle (chicagoreader.com)

The House is Black / خانه سیاه است

Image via Wikipedia

1962, 22 Minutes, Black and White, 35mm

It is the only film from Forough Farrokhzad, possibly Iran's most noted and controversial female poet. A look inside a leper colony, the documentary short has been called "the greatest of all Iranian films" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, and is (now) frequently referred to as one of the lynchpins of the Iranian New Wave. Following an opening statement accompanying a black screen that simultaneously warns and invites viewers to gaze upon that which society has deemed horrifying, Farrokhzad trains her lens insistently on the decay of human faces in bleak honesty, observing the lepers' flaccid eyelids (incapable of doing the biological job of protecting the eyes behind them from flies), the crusty, flaking stumps that used to be their feet, and their exposed nose cavities completely devoid of cartilage (one of them casually and surreally exhales cigarette smoke from the orifice). While showing the leper community forging an ersatz societal representation of normalcy.  Old gents playing board games, women dressing up and donning make-up for what appears to be a wedding march (and once you've seen a woman apply mascara to the inside of her eyelid, the image will not soon leave your head), kids tossing a plastic ball around the courtyard. 

Farrokhzad soundtracks her images with an alternating narration. A male voice (whose detached matter-of-factness brings to mind a contemporary Jean-Luc Godard at his most bemused) unpacks the medical implications of the condition, gently reminding the audience that leprosy is a treatable condition, provided the proper expediency, in what constitutes the film's most salient instance of activism. But between the clinical dialogue (in every sense of the definition) are snips of poetry by Farrokhzad, read by the author herself, that elevates the colony's plight to the level of that Old Testament paragon of unanswered and cruel kismet: Job. If Farrokhzad's poetic sensibilities were said to be both preoccupied with Eastern mores and influenced by Western modernism, then The House is Black authoritatively

clears the path for such aesthetic dilettantism. -- Eric Henderson

Via UBUWEB

Related articles

• The Circle (chicagoreader.com)
• Jafar Panahi's reward for bringing cinematic glory to Iran? Jail | Hamid Dabashi (guardian.co.uk)
• Letters: Iranian film-makers (guardian.co.uk)
• Directors of the Decade: Ramin Bahrani (filmexperience.blogspot.com)

A Journey Round My Skull: Persian Handstands

A new series exploring elements of Iranian Visual, architectural, and literary styles from The Safavids  onward. 

Mihr Ali, Fath Ali Shah, Qajar Painting, 1813-14
above and below images come from wikimedia

Mihr Ali, Qajar Painting, 1813-14

Anonymous, from the Shahinshahnameh, 1810
(detail of freaky camels)

Muhammad Hasan Afshar, portrait of Nasir al-Din Shah, with cherubs, 1854-55

Muhammad 'Ali, portrait miniature of Muhammad Shah, c. 1845

Unknown (again the Shirin painter?), A girl standing on her hands

These paintings come mostly from two books: Qajar Paintings (1972) and Qajar Portraits (1999) (the latter going for an obscene $500 on Amazon at the moment).
Read about Qajar art on wikipedia.
From a Sotheby's auction: "Court painting in Qajar Persia gave particular importance to the representation of women. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, royal artists were attracted by European depictions of female subjects, borrowing certain poses, imagery and stylistic techniques into their own work."
Women were often the focal point of the Shirin Painter, and I can't wait to dig up more of his acrobats. Qajar Paintings contains a group of these, but not in color (hence that last scan).

Read more: A Journey Round My Skull: Persian Handstands