TIFF season is upon us again. For the past few weeks, I’ve been patiently entering each batch of announced films into a spreadsheet, and noting with growing alarm the number of great films that are making their way to my city. Each year, I preview a few in the hope that it helps me narrow things down. In this first post, I’ll focus on documentaries:
Bassidji (Director: Mehran Tamadon): This looks timely in light of the recently contested presidential election in Iran. The filmmaker followed members of the Islamist citizen militia over three years in an attempt to understand their rabid support for Iran’s Islamic revolution. These are the same people who have been blamed for much of the post-election violence inflicted on protesters. There are allegations that the government controls them at arm’s length in order to deny responsibility for any “excesses.”
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Cleanflix (Directors: Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi): I remember reading a few years ago about several Utah companies who rented “edited” versions of Hollywood movies to devout Mormon customers. All the sex, violence and bad language had been removed. I always wondered how long and how coherent the resulting movies could be. This documentary follows these entrepreneurs, some of whom experienced a few R-rated plot twists of their own.
Official site of the film
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The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Directors: Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith): Daniel Ellsberg was a trusted Pentagon insider until he leaked The Pentagon Papers, exposing how the government had been lying about the Vietnam War. Nixon became so enraged and obsessed with punishing Ellsberg that it contributed to bringing down his government and ending the war.
Official site of the film
Tagged as:
#tiff09,
censorship,
iran,
mormonism,
nixon,
religion,
vietnam,
watergate
Persepolis (Directors: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud): Based upon the graphic novels which were blockbusters in France (and now published in
one volume), Persepolis faithfully brings Marjane Satrapi’s story and images to the screen and then wonderfully surpasses them. Growing up in Iran under the repression of first the Shah’s dictatorship and then that of the Islamic Republic was not easy, even for someone like Satrapi whose family had money and connections. The film grabs our sympathy through several strongly-drawn (if you’ll forgive the pun) characters, from her saucy grandmother to her dashing political dissident uncle Anoush. But it’s ultimately the story of Marjane herself that carries us along. Her developing political awareness is connected to her personal history of displacement and the ordinary “feeling different” of adolescence.
What makes the story even more powerful is the superb animation. Two-dimensional and for the most part in black and white, it nonetheless never feels less than thrilling, and just when I was finished shaking my head at some gorgeous and poetic flourish, there was another one. I haven’t seen a film that was this consistently innovative for a long time. And yet it didn’t feel showy, as if it were the latest CGI technology trying to draw attention to itself. I had the feeling of looking over the shoulder of an intensely talented artist doodling in her notebook while telling me the most incredible story.
Best of all, at a time when many people are thinking of Iran as a potential enemy, it’s crucial to see a human story from a place where the civilization is thousands of years old. There isn’t much history in the film, but what’s there is presented simply. I was left wanting the film to continue both backwards and forwards in time, and desperately hoping along with Satrapi that the future is brighter for the long-suffering people of Iran.
Teaser
Trailer
Official Site
(9/10)
Tagged as:
animation,
iran,
TIFF
Kargaran mashghoole karand (Men At Work) (Director: Mani Haghighi, Iran, 2006): Kargaran mashghoole karand (Men At Work) begins with four middle-aged men driving home to catch an important football match on television. Three of them are talking and joking around while the other naps. He wakes up and bugs them until they finally pull over and allow him to make a pit-stop on the side of the road on the edge of a canyon. While they are stopped, they discover a tall, narrow rock formation sticking out of the ground. This film is about their attempts at trying to figure out how it got there, but ultimately how to knock it down.
It doesn’t sound like a very intriguing story, but somehow it is. And funny. The situation these men impose upon themselves can surely be a metaphor for any kind of obstacle that one may face in life, or it could really just be about how difficult it is to dislodge a big rock from the earth.
Through alternating moments of silence, comedic and almost slap-stick antics, emotional outbursts and acts of desperation, we learn of these mens’ relationships with women (two of whom conveniently show up, join the challenge for a while, and then leave) and each other, but mainly we see how differently they each deal with this “problem.”
I have seen a few Iranian films from the past few years, and most of them are about women and their struggles within their culture. This film, however, may focus on the possibly neglected point of view of the men, and perhaps this is why the offensive rock is quite, well, phallic. Is this a commentary on the different attitudes that some Iranian men may have about their male-dominated society? If so, then how does one explain the relatively passive attitudes of the women who show up? (One can make a metaphor of anything, I suppose.)
In the end, after periods of working together and then literally giving up and leaving someone behind, the four friends learn that sometimes problems can solve themselves.
Tagged as:
DVD,
DVD Clubs,
Film Movement,
iran
