Iran

Quote:
Made for the Central Bank of Iran to celebrate the collection of precious jewels kept in the treasury, this film remains filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan’s most visually dazzling work, embellished with terrific camera movements.

Some of the most iconic landscape photography in the history of Iranian cinema can be found within a minute after the opening credits, in which peasants of various ethnicities and tribes are quickly reviewed, all posed in a graceful manner, like kings without being kings. Like a work of musical composition, a simple act of ploughing is spread across shots of various size and angle, creating an intimate visual symphony. And then appears one of Golestan’s allegorical match-cuts: a farmer seen on the horizon before a cut to a diamond on a dark background – the farmer is the jewel.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 »

Synopsis:
Two boys compete for one job they both desperately need.

Awards:
Won – 1992 – Crystal Simorgh Award – Best Film – Fajr Film Festival
Featured in Film Magazine’s Best Iranian film lists of 2009 and 2008
Read More »

A young teenager returns home after an absence to find his village in Iran deserted because of an incredibly severe drought. He begins a search to find his family, traveling through an amazingly bleak and desolate landscape. Primarily an essay on the issue of humans vs. nature, the film is of interest for technical and cultural reasons.Read More »

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 »

Quote:
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 »