Iran

In a ‘cinemascape’ of lyricism and allegory, Majid Majidi inhabits a space that is uniquely his own, where, with a flourish of quiet sentimentality and poetic poise, he unfurls for us a spiritual fable of a righteous man placed in the pastoral rural and the materialistic urban. Majidi is a relatively later figure in Iranian cinema, but to my mind, certainly not a lesser figure. In a telling moment in آواز گنجشک‌ها (The Song of Sparrows,) the protagonist Karim (played convincingly by the inimitable Reza Naji) breaks into a nostalgia soaked song that brings smiles to the saddened young boys surrounding him – “Our flowers have withered, our eyes are crying, I remember the good old days….The world is a lie, the world is a dream ….I’ve passed my youth in pain in this world.” The pastoral rural marked by close family ties, community living, and proximity to the ‘living world’ lies in stark contrast to the transactional, corrupting and materialistic core of the urban, and in straddling these seemingly incompatible universes, Karim has to be committed to his essential righteousness, to his faith. Read More…

Emerging out of the shadows of the much venerated Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s emphatic debut feature won him many accolades over the years, and deservedly so. A collaboration of scriptwriter Kiarostami and writer-director Panahi, ‘Badkonake Sefid‘ (The White Balloon, 1995) holds on dearly to the cinematic realism of Panahi’s larger oeuvre, along with the mise-en-scene sensibilities central to a certain tendency in the Iranian ‘new wave’ cinema. In telling the story of a 7 year old girl’s (Razieh) longing for ownership of a chubby gold fish around the Iranian New Year, Panahi masterfully controls his material, absorbing the audience entirely into his heroine’s delicate, innocent, enquiring world, playing it out on the often unkind streets of Tehran. With the narrative hinged around the loss (and subsequent regaining) of the means of purchase of an object of desire, Panahi chooses to bring a cinematic style of subtlety and remarkable human detail. Watch. Read More…