Here are a few articles about film in Iran, for whoever is interested. They are coming out with come truly brilliant shit. It really makes you wonder where the hell it is coming from, with a government like that.

Watch The Taste of Cherry, whether you're interested in film or not. Seriously.


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Iranian Women Make Films
Film International, (Quarterly)
Summer 1994,
Vol. 2, No. 3, P.P. 4 - 13
by: Reza Tahami

Text:

Cinema was only five years old when it came to Iran at the beginning of the 20th century. The arrival of cinema was initiated by Mozaffareddin Shah, the monarch who endorsed the country's first constitutional law. He had ordered his royal court's special photographer Mirza Ebrahim Khan, in 1900 to buy the equipments of cinematography from France and bring them to his capital, Tehran. Screenings started almost immediately at noblemen's houses, though not equally for both sexes. Special arrangements were in fact made for women who had to see early moving pictures at segregated screening sessions.

However, men - and only men - in the street had to wait another five years for going to the movies. For women the privilege was to come in 21 years, when the country's first professional cameraman, khanbaba Mo'tazedi, opened a movie theatre for women in 1926. Traditional circles were, however, still strongly against going to the movies; a place they believed advocated western values and secularism, if not blasphemy. Mo'tazedi's Cinema Khorshid was closed down after one year when it did not have any more movies to show. Two years later he opened another theatre, Cinema Sanati, which was extraordinarily successful but, it was soon demolished in a fire. Mo'tazedi took advantage of the incident saying that the women would have felt more secure if they had been accompanied by their husbands or brothers when the fire broke out. He had a clear but hardly possible proposal: mixed theatres. A practical solution, however, made it possible: Ladies on the right, gents on the left.

Cinema Pari opened under such conditions and with the support of the police. Soon other theatres followed suit and admitted mixed audience. The doors of movie theatres were thus opened to Iranian women about three decades after the arrival of cinema in Iran.

The first Iranian movie was produced in 1930. Abi and Rabi, a comedy with no women on the cast or the crew. It was still too outrageous even to think of women in front of a movie camera in Iran. But the spell was broken this time pretty soon. The second Iranian movie, Brother's Revenge (1931) had two women on the cast, both non- Muslim women. Thus the taboo was bypassed; and this became an example to be followed in third film to be made in Iran Haj Agha the Film Actor (1933). That movie was directed by Ovaness Oganiance. Its interesting story advocated cinema, yet its leading actress was an Armenian woman, Asia Koestanian. Oganiance later opened Iran's actors' studio to train actors and particularly actresses for the burgeoning Iranian cinema: but his attempt failed.

The man to break the spell was Abdolhossein Sepanta who made Iran's first talkie with a Muslim woman, Ruhangiz, playing its leading role. Quite a surprise was. After The Lur Girl (1933), Sepanta made a number of other films in India, where the first one had been made, each with a new actress. The list of Iranian actresses became longer and longer although Iranian families were generally against their daughters' presence in the movies. About one third of the four thousand people who have appeared in Iranian films in leading and supporting roles in the past 60 years or so, are women.

Yet, acting is the only field in filmmaking that has attracted the biggest number of Iranian women. Second to that is screenwriting only if one fails to take into account the position of script girl which is predominantly tailored for women. Of the 600 people who have written at least one screenplay only 22 are women. Even from among them 17 have written a screenplay only once in their lifetime. This leaves only Ensieh Shah- Hosseini, Moniru Ravanipour and Jahan Khademolmeleh as real screenwriters among Iranian women. A few others who can have the same title are better known as film directors. All of these women have their careers formed in the years following Iran's Islamic Revolution. Before that only seven Iranian women had written screenplays.

After screenwriting. there is film production (16 women) and directing (11 women). There were more women producers in the years before the 1979 revolution but most of them were actresses who had produced their own films or those who had contributed to a family venture. Only one of them Marva Nabili (The Sealed Soil, 1978) was a director who happened to finance her own movie; which she took with her abroad. Nevertheless, none of them can be categorized as professional producer.

The five women producers of post-revolution years are quite different women. Their work is characterized by consistency and efficiency. Fereshteh Taerpour, the successful managing director of the House of Arts and Letters for Children and Adolescents of Iran has so far produced more then 20 feature films and TV series. She is followed by director Tahmineh Milani who has co-produced three of her films, director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, director Pouran Derakhshandeh and production manager Mahvash Jazayeri.

Three women has ever made a feature film in the years before 1979; one in 1956 and the other two in the late 70's. On the other hand, of the 8 women who have directed films after that, 4 are making their 4th or 5th movies, one has made two movies and tens of TV programs, and two others are beginners. None of them, even Tahmineh Ardakani who died in a plane crash last year, were accidental film directors. However, 11 women directors are just a few when seen among the 450 Iranian film directors.

Even fewer are the women who have chosen the technological side of filmmaking. In the past 84 years there has been only one camerawoman in Iran: Parvaneh Mohayman, whose husband is also a cinematographer. She has shot three films.

The situation is little bit better among composers. There are two of them! Giti Pashaee (the wife of director Massoud Kimiaee) who composed original film scores for three films by her husband between 1986 and 1991; and Susan Shakerin (the wife of another director, Rajab Mohammadin) who has made three original film scores for her husband's films between 1988 and 1990 and one for Cyrus Alvand's Strike (1991). Except for film editing, women's presence in the other fields of filmmaking is next to nothing. But outside the domain of professional cinema, women seem to be more active. Relatively a large number of girl students in film schools look promising; yet there are many indications that filmmaking in Iran is a men's job.

IRANIAN WOMEN'S PRESENCE IN FILMMAKING
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Field total (1930-94 women (1930- 79) women Acting 4000 1200 500 Screenwriting 600 22 7 Film production 650 16 11 Film directing 470 11 3 Music 110 1 -- Cinematography 180 1 1 Rakhshan Bani-Etemad

Born in 1954, Shiraz, Started her career at the Iranian television in 1973 as director. Made several short documentaries. Started her career as professional filmmaker as assistant director to Kianush Ayyari (The Monster, 1985) and made her first feature film, Off Limits in 1988. She has just finished her fifth movie. The Blue Scarf.

Films 1985: Off Limits, 1989: Canary Yellow, 1990: Foreign Exchange, 1992: Nargess, 1994: The Blue Scarf.

"I still haven't reached such categorizations like feminine or masculine cinema. I don't know what is a woman's cinema. I don't like this kind of segregation.

Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past Present and Future

Trade paper.
New York: Verso Books.
2001, 320pp.
ISBN 1-85984-332-8


In 1995, introducing one of the opening night films at the 22nd Telluride Film Festival, Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, Werner Herzog made the following statement: "What I say tonight will be a banality in the future. The greatest films of the world today are being made in Iran." This utterance may have taken some aback. After all, in the popular mind of Americans the image of Iran was indelibly linked to hostage-takers and U.S. flag-burning zealots.

While his encounter with Iranian films in the early 1990s was something of a discovery for Herzog, decades prior, as early as the 1950s, another luminary of the world of cinema, the French filmmaker Chris Marker, had already come across Iranian cinema. He writes of stopovers in Tehran on his way to or from the Far East.

"Tehran with its sky that always looked ten times more vast than the skies of the Occident. The moment of dusk when daylight still hangs, bluish, and when brass lamps are being lit already … and the best vodka-limes West of Hong Kong. All those I came to know there Ghaffari, Faroughi … Golestan … were charming and extraordinary but Forough… was the most extraordinary of them all."

His reference is to Forough Farrokhzad, the Iranian poet and filmmaker who in the span of her short life redefined the cultural landscape of her day. In the course of a career cut short by her death in a car accident at the age of 33, she produced a body of work that exploded onto a burgeoning cultural scene. She had the rare talent and sensibility that straddled the lyrical and the social. That she chose a leper colony as the subject for her only film, the 22-minute documentary The House Is Black (1962) is telling. In the film, while her gaze clings to her particular subject, she speaks to the disinherited the world over.

What distinguished Forough Farrokhzad’s film was an ability to marry poetry to naked realism. This combination was to be a characteristic of a number of works that emerged from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s in Iranian cinema. Farrokh Ghaffari’s film Jonoob-e-Shahr (South of the City, 1958), a critical look at the southern part of a Tehran whose northern foothills were inhabited by the affluent, marks the beginning of this period. However, it is the self-exiled filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless’ classic Tabiat-E-Bi-Jan (Still Life, 1975) that marks the high point of this era. Its extremely slow pace and painterly visuals garnered comparisons to the work of Iran’s master poet Nima Yushij. Other landmark films were Masoud Kimai’s Qaisar (1969) and a film by Mehrjui, Gav (The Cow), which won the Venice film festival Grand Prize in 1969. These films directly addressed issues of disenfranchisement and abject neglect. They encountered a rigid and virulent censorship machine and were at times promptly banned.

The broader landscape of the Iranian film industry during this period was marked by neglect. The government’s economic policies favored the importation of foreign films over domestic production. This, coupled with stringent censorship policies, resulted in the production of great numbers of vapid formulaic entertainment films. One consequence of this state of affairs was that the film industry was largely identified with the Shah’s efforts at rapid Westernization of the country and its catastrophic social consequences. In 1978, during a turbulent prerevolutionary period, the Rex movie theater in Abadan was set on fire, its doors locked from the outside. Four hundred people died in that fire. Numerous other cinema burnings followed.

One may have assumed that the ascendance of the Islamic régime and its own brand of censorial regulation would put the final nail in the coffin of Iranian cinema. What evolved was quite the opposite. As early as the mid-1980s, the Islamic government set up extremely strict guidelines clarifying what was and was not allowed on the screen. A Kafkaesque multistage system of approvals was designed, determining the grant of exhibition permits. The importation of foreign films was strongly curtailed. Greater economic incentives for the local film industry were provided. An impressive number of extraordinary films were produced in the ensuing years, many of which have since been seen by international audiences worldwide.

Even more surprisingly, Iranian women filmmakers, previously barely a presence, have made their mark both domestically and internationally in the last twenty years. While they are still greatly outnumbered by their male counterparts, their voices are distinct — chief amongst them are Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Tahmineh Milani.

Of the filmmakers working in Iran today, Abbas Kiarostami is the most direct heir to the legacy of Shahid Saless’ cinema and to the poetic tradition of Forough Farrokhzad. Simple narratives, the use of nonprofessional actors and the blurring of the lines between fiction and documentary are characteristic of Kiarostami’s films, which are essentially feature-length poetic meditations. Although he has been making films since 1970, it was his 1987 Where Is the Friend’s House that first stunned audiences in the West. Since then Kiarostami’s star has only continued its rise. He received the 1997 Palme d’Or at Cannes for his film Taste of Cherry. In 1999 he was unequivocally voted the most important film director of the 1990s by two international critics polls. He is today acknowledged as a new master of the world cinema on a par with such directors as Bresson and Kurosawa. In March 2000, Philip Lopate wrote: "We don’t know it yet, but we are living in the age of Kiarostami."

Kiarostami’s cinema and its bare-boned aesthetics form one pole of Iranian cinema. The other is exemplified by the masterful works of Bahram Beizai. An accomplished playwright, filmmaker, and writer, Beizai’s works explore a visual realm redolent with mythology. His collaborations with the actress Sussan Taslimi produced a number of intensely poignant films including Bashu, the Little Stranger (1991). Beizai has not had the same ease as some others in navigating the rules and regulations of the Islamic Republic, and for the last two years many have awaited the release of his most recent film.

If Beizai and Kiarostami form the twin pillars of Iranian cinema, Mohsen Makhmalbaf represents its strongest component since the advent of the Islamic revolution. Makhmalbaf, who emerged from an underprivileged background and was at first strongly identified with the Islamic regime, is a self-taught filmmaker. His prolific body of work includes 21 features. His films are graceful and bold stylistically as well as in their choice of subject. His latest film, Kandahar (2001), will be released in the U.S. this January and was made before the current crisis in Afghanistan. "I wanted to portray in personal terms the desperate situation that exists in that country." His iconoclasm is further reflected in his home-schooling of his daughter Samira. She emerged as the youngest of a new generation of filmmakers when at 18 she presented her first film, The Apple, scripted and edited by her father, at the Cannes film festival. In 2000, at the age of 20, her second feature, Blackboards, was awarded the Jury Prize at the same festival.

Several other filmmakers of note began their careers as assistants to veteran filmmakers, including the split-recipients of the Camera d’Or at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, Bahman Ghobadi, for A Time for Drunken Horses and Hassan Yektapanah for Djomeh. Both had both worked as assistants to Kiarostami. Another ex-assistant of Kiarostami’s is Jafar Panahi, whose film The Circle was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2000. In the last two years, more than a dozen Iranian films have been in distribution in the United States to both critical and popular acclaim. Werner Herzog’s words have proven to be prophetic.

The audiences who have been discovering and enjoying these films are avid to learn more about Iranian cinema. A book presenting a comprehensive general history of Iranian cinema would be greeted with curiosity, enthusiasm, and interest by this public. It is frustrating that Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past Present and Future is not that book. It would seem that the author’s vast reservoir of knowledge about the subject, his commitment to exploring the history of Iranian film, and a sincere passion for film evidenced by his charming prologue detailing his childhood memories of the movies in Iran might well have made him the ideal candidate for writing such a book. Sadly, this is not the case.

At every juncture Dabashi’s attachment to an analysis of Iranian cinema through the prism of Marxist critical theory derails his book. The result is a stodgy academic text devoid of interest to the general reader. More dramatically, the narrowness of his perspective ultimately detracts from his ability to objectively evaluate the merits of the works he considers.

In his first chapter, the thesis is reflected in the following statement: "The story of Iranian cinema is concomitant with the project of modernity as an extended arm of colonialism, itself necessitated by the rise of competing national bourgeoisie…"

This remark is followed by: "After almost 200 years of Iranian exposure to the project of modernity, the historical experiment ultimately failed for a number of crucial reasons, among them the colonial prevention of the formation of a self-conscious national bourgeoisie and the catastrophic consequences of the economic placement of Iran in a disadvantageous position in the productive logic of global capitalism"

The above sentence is typical of Dabashi’s prose style as he proceeds on a mediated analysis of the films with references to the theories of stalwart icons of modern critical theory and philosophy such as Hegel and Adorno, Kristeva and Foucault.

The book primarily examines the works of five major directors: Kiarostami, Beizai, Farmanara, Makhmalbaf, and in the chapter on women filmmakers, Bani-Etemad. Two additional chapters form an introduction and a final analysis. The book’s structure includes straight interviews with some filmmakers and straight analysis of the works of others. This leaves the lingering impression of a series of random essays tacked onto one another and forced into the confines of Dabashi’s thesis where possible. The interviews, which may have benefited from some editorial intervention, provide interesting biographical details but rarely any illuminations of the body of the filmmakers’ work.

In a meandering last chapter, Dabashi brings together a Freudian analysis of Iranian politics with the previously stated thesis and concludes that the "older generation of public intellectuals" in Iran, amongst whom he includes Kiarostami, "were bound to have an expansive ego because they were the end, albeit negational, result of absolutist tyrannies." Here he justifies dismissing Kiarostami’s masterful 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us Away as essentially irrelevant, deferring instead to the three young filmmakers who received the awards at Cannes 2000 as heralding a new and relevant cinema.

While the framework of historical criticism can be a useful tool to penetrate a text, it does not justify judging a work based on its social or historical context. The distinction is subtle. This is the pitfall that Dabashi stumbles into when he supplants the transcendent nature of the artistic gaze with the apparatus of criticism. Every great film ultimately extricates itself from the confines of temporal conditions and accesses the universal. It withstands the test of many generations of critics and of many forms of government. To judge a work of art in relation to its political environment is to subject it to a tyranny that is alien to the very act of creation. Happily, Dabashi’s domain does not extend beyond the realm of this book.

Hopefully, of the several writers of note who have addressed different aspects of Iranian cinema in their writing over the course of the last several years — chief amongst them Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jamsheed Akrami, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Hamid Naficy, and Godfrey Cheshire, the venerable Variety and New York Times critic — one will soon present a definitive history of Iranian cinema. In the meantime, those of us living in Los Angeles have the privilege of easy access to scores of incredible Iranian films on video available through the various video rental outlets on Westwood, otherwise known to the Iranian community as Tehrangeles! January 2002 | Issue 35
Copyright © 2002 by Dorna Khazeni

Dorna Khazeni is a writer and translator living in Los Angeles.

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Iranian New Wave

The surprise international success story of Iranian cinema. By Ali Hendessi

In a country where it takes several months or even years to get permission to make a film, where shortage of equipment means working with a single camera is normal and working with two is considered technically advanced and where male and female actors are not allowed to touch hands let alone kiss or play intimate scenes, it's close to a miracle that cinema has become such a success story.

Iranian cinema has been widely celebrated as one the most vibrant and prolific film industries of the past decade and Iranian films have enjoyed enormous popularity in international festivals. Films such as "Gabbeh", by Mohsen Makhmalbaf; the highly acclaimed "The Apple" by his daughter Samira Makhmalbaf, who was only 17 when she made her directorial debut and "Taste of Cherry", by Abbas Kiarostami, which won the Palm d'Or prize at the International Cannes Film Festival.

The history of Iranian cinema dates back to the 1930s, but it was not until a decade before the revolution of 1979, that a new generation of film makers reject the escapist slapstick style of those days and started making films of high cinematic quality and social consciousness. This new wave in Iranian cinema was heralded by Daryoush Mehrjooi's "The Cow", a disturbing story of rural poverty and insanity, in which the mysterious death of the only cow in a village drives its owner to madness. The film which was banned, was only given a conditional permit after its rousing success at the Venice Film Festival. The censors were hard at work before the revolution too.

Cinema, in post revolution Iran, could have had a very different fate. During the 1979 revolution more than 200 cinemas were torched by arsonists driven by Islamic fervour, who saw films as a corrupt influence. Film production came to a halt and many actors and directors were indicted on charges of corrupting society. More than 2000 domestic and foreign films were banned and a new code of practise put film production under direct control of the government.

That policy was challenged in the late 1980s by the current president, Mohammad Khatami, who declared "cinema is not the mosque", which forced his resignation as the minister of Islamic culture and guidance. His landslide presidential election victory in 1997, has lead to a more liberal enforcement of the censorship rules. Today, the fact that film makers have so far been untouched by the recent crackdown on pro-reform newspapers and magazines, is a testament to the international popularity of Iranian cinema, which more effectively than anything else has burnished the country's negative image abroad.

Yet, international success doesn't necessarily result in domestic popularity. This is because these films are not truly representative of life in Iran, according to Hamid Nafissi, associate professor of film and media at Rice University and author of several books on Iranian film and television. He says, "landscape for example, is used in such a way that gives a highly romantic impression of Iran as primarily rural and traditional, when most of the population lives in the cities". "Children of Heaven" by Majeed Majeedi for example, is set amidst flower-filled fields that only exist in a small part of Iran and for only a few weeks of the year. Ordinary people don't go to see these films because they don't relate to them. And this lack of popularity is reflected in lack of box office success. Paradoxically, one of the most commercially successful films in Iran was the American blockbuster "Dances with Wolves", starring Kevin Costner, which was allowed to be screened by the authorities.

The prospect of success and recognition abroad has meant that film making as a career choice amongst young people is at an all time high. The classified sections of most newspapers are full of advertisements for acting, directing and other film related courses. There are record numbers of film school graduates and each year more than 20 new directors make their debut films, many of them women. Directors like, Majeed Majeedi, Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Ghobadi, who's first film, "A Time for Drunken Horses", won the Camera d'Or award at Cannes Film Festival last year.

As the international popularity of Iranian films grows, major film festivals are going out of their way to show them. "That's because Iranian films tell simple tales of humanly shared feelings, like sadness and love", says Rose Issa, curator of a recent season of Iranian films at the Barbican Arts Centre in London. She says, "it's their poeticism and modesty, despite financial, technical and legal restrictions, which make Iranian films so special". Films like Mohsen Makhmalbaf's dazzlingly colourful folk romance, "Gabbeh", which is set amongst the nomadic tribes of south eastern Iran, and centring on the region's distinctive gabbeh carpets, on which the narratives of tribal life are woven.

With the annual production steadily rising, every year there are more than 80 films made by some 400 directors, which ensures that Iran will continue as a pool of filmmaking talent for years to come.

Ali Hendessi is a freelance journalist and broadcaster living in London.

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Iranian New Wave
By Lubna Abdel-Aziz

The slender figure found his way to the stage amidst thunderous applause. His head inclined modestly, his attire dark and unconventional, his eyes concealed behind the familiar dark round glasses, he seemed to smile from within. He received his Lifetime Achievement Award, bowed ever so slightly as the applause continued. The year was 2000, the place - Thermal Auditorium of Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, the occasion, their 35th International Film Festival, the man - Iranian film director/auteur, Abbas Kiarostami.

The lavish endorsement of the crowd was for the man, as well as for the New Wave of his country's national cinema. For a land that has gone through so much political and religious turmoil, how has it been able to generate a style so distinguished in its splendour, so resolute in its courage, that festivals around the world regularly seek its presence? Why have Iranian films with their small budgets, heavy censorship, religious restrictions and limited distribution gripped the imagination of film connoisseurs around the world?

The answer is clear. It is effortlessly simple, conceptually complex and visually lyrical. Its themes are universal and such inbred traditional restrictions are the very reasons why a screenwriter or director can literally speak to us without the use of words, in the comfort of ambiguous, concealed, and symbolic imagery.

Abbas Kiarostami director/auteur
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The story of Iranian cinema is as old as it is new. The fascination with images started 2,500 years ago on the walls of the ancient temples of Persepolis, the centre of art and culture of the known world, until its destruction by Alexander the Great in 330 BC. The grandeur of Ancient Persia fell to the Greeks, Parthians, Sassanids, and later the Arabs in 641 AD. During the Muslim era the country developed world famous Muslim centres of culture and learning. Between the 1200s and 1900s, it gradually lost its wealth and power until the discovery of oil in the 20th century, which set the country on the road to new wealth.

Shah Mozaffar Al-Din introduced cinema to Iran after viewing an exhibit of cinematography at the Paris Exposition of August 1900. By 1930 there were no more than fifteen theatres in Tehran. Today the number of theatres exceeds 500. Most of its film production was cheap, banal and obscene, called Filmfarsi. The New Wave was inspired by the social and cultural developments occurring in the country during the 60s. The first remarkable film in the New Wave was Dariush Mehrjui's seminal film, The Cow (1969), a disturbing tale of poverty and mental breakdown in which the mysterious death of a cow in a village drives its owner insane. It was followed by Massoud Kinyayee's Qaysar, and Khosser Tarqvaie's Calm in Front of Others. They set off a trend that was cultural, dynamic and intellectual. The Iranian viewer became discriminating, encouraging the new trend to prosper and develop. In 3-4 years, 40-50 noteworthy films were made, establishing the New Wave of Iranian cinema.

Mohamed Reza Pahlevi became Shah in 1941. But in 1979, he was overthrown by Moslem revolutionaries, causing an almost fatal blow to Iran's film industry. FilmFarsi and foreign productions were perceived as agents of moral corruption. Filmmakers were indicted, film productions came to a halt.

The new wave was determined to survive despite codes, censorship and a plethora of restrictions. One advantage was their President Mohamed Khatemi, who actively supported the New Wave movement and remains a formidable movie fan. He was the creator of the blueprint for the revival of Iran's cinema, encouraging serious artistic works of the calibre that will gain recognition at International Film Festivals. It paid off. Abbas Kiarostami gained broad international appeal with his loose trilogy. In 1987 Where is the Friend's House? won him the bronze Pardo at Locarno Film Festival, And Life Goes On won the Rosselini Prize at Cannes and the third film in the trilogy was the outstanding Through the Olive Trees. The crowning of his work however, came in 1997 with his film, Taste of Cherry, awarded the most coveted prize in filmdom after the Oscars, the Palme D'or for best film, at Cannes Film Festival.

A Tehran native, Kiarostami joined the school of painting and graphic arts at the University of Tehran. He began his career by designing posters, illustrating children's books and directing commercials. But he soon started to fulfill his dream. He directed short and long feature films depicting real life subjects. Textures of humanity, gently and lyrically seen through the eyes of the artist, became his trademark, focusing on children as the key to understanding the world. .

The subject of his much acclaimed film, Taste of Cherry is suicide, a forbidden act in Islam as well as other religions. How could he deal with such a subject given the mood of his country and government? Kiarostami defends his choice " It is the role of art to discover, question, and expose taboos for what they are worth". The story is about a middle-aged man who lost his will to live. The cycle of happiness and despair are not separate but intricately tied to each other. Such a universal theme has been expressed again and again in world literature. Shakespeare stated "there is a soul of goodness in things evil" and Shelley cried, "Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought". At the depth of sadness one seeks happiness and at the height of happiness one courts the reality of sadness. He has won the world with his universal views as he dressed fiction in the garment of fact, and fact in the garment of fiction.

Besides Kiarostami, many prominent directors carry the banner of the national Iranian cinema. Makhmalbaf is a name that stands out in the ranks of the New Wave cinema. He tackles the poor, the damaged, the disenfranchised, and the downtrodden. Kandahar, his latest effort, explores the pitiful fate of Moslem women under Taliban rule. There are over a dozen Iranian directors whose works are viewed, hailed, and honored at festivals, museums, and art theatres around the world. They will eventually find their way to commercial theatres and filmgoers will then have a taste of the excellence on celluloid coming out of Tehran. So, in Kiarostami's words, borrowed from Jean Claude Carrière: "We should continue dreaming until we change real life to conform to our dreams" or as his own ancestor Omar Khayyam put it almost 1,000 years ago:

"Ah love, couldst thou and I with fate conspire

To change this sorry scheme of things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits - and then

Remould it nearer to the hearts desire?"

Iranian New Wave Cinema is exerting a credible and earnest effort as it reaches out for its place in the sun.

The audience at the elegant Opera House applauded loud and long, as the slender figure found his way to the stage, with head bent low and round dark glasses. He bowed slowly as he received yet another Life Achievement Award. This time the tribute was offered by the people of Egypt at the 2001 Silver Jubilee of the Cairo Film Festival. The head of this year's international jury is the modest, the brilliant, Abbas Kiarostami. Often compared to the illustrious, the elite, such as Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Jacques Tati, it is appropriate to close with a quote from another member of this select group, that best defines his extraordinary creations: "Words cannot describe my feelings about them; I simply advise you to see his films" Akira Kurosawa.

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Defining Iranian Cinema
expound upon their knowledge of Iranian cinema, and eventually the names Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf will inevitably crop up. This is perfectly understandable; they have both, after all, been at the forefront of the huge international success story that is Iranian Cinema for over 20 years. Indeed, it was Kiarostami’s film Where’s the Friend’s House? and Makhmalbaf’s The Peddler, both made in 1987 – and perhaps more significantly than either of these films, Amir Naderi’s The Runner, made in 1985 – which sparked off the ensuing worldwide interest in Iranian cinema. Since then, both Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf (more on Naderi later) have been steadily expanding their respective oeuvres, producing a body of films that ensure their continued synonymity with the term ‘Iranian Cinema’, among them Close-Up, Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami), and Once Upon A Time, Cinema, Gabbeh, A Moment of Innocence (Makhmalbaf). There is however, nothing particularly ‘Iranian’ about this phenomenon. Just as a mere handful of directors, such as Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, came to be almost entirely representative of the New German Cinema movement, and directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut became synonymous with the term New French Wave, so too post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema has come to be characterized by the works of a few internationally successful and acclaimed auteurs. And although this exclusive canon of directors has been widened ever so slightly in recent years to incorporate the likes of Dariush Mehrjui, Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, and Samira Makhmalbaf, only the most avid World Cinema enthusiast would most likely be savvy to them. I should note that ‘savvy’ has only recently become a fully functioning word in my vocabulary after watching Pirates of the Caribbean (Jack Sparrow = cool). And on a side note, what the bloody hell does ‘World Cinema’ mean exactly?
This problem is compounded by the frustrating tendency amongst even the most discerning film aficionados, and within the academic discipline of Film Studies itself, to view the historical development of the cinema of any given country with a huge pair of blinkers. Can you name an Iranian film made prior to the revolution in 1978/79? Non? Think so I did not. And if you can, then you’re either an Iranian or an academic. Likewise, if you believe all of the recent literature published on Iranian cinema, you’d be forgiven for thinking that cinema in Iran begins in 1979, and that absolutely nothing existed before it. This, to put it politely, is charand (Farsi for ‘nonsense’). Iranian film dates all the way back to 1900, when Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi, the official photographer of the court of Mozaffar al-Din Shah, shot some documentary footage of the monarch’s trip to Belgium. Some of this footage can be seen in Makhmalbaf’s Once Upon A Time, Cinema. The very first Iranian movie, Abi and Rabi, directed by Ovanes Ohanian, was made in 1929. But as I said earlier, this article isn’t a history lesson, so to return to my argument (I think I had one)….
While the relative obscurity and unavailability of pre-revolutionary Iranian films therefore understandably precludes the attempts of even the most determined film-collector from compiling an adequate knowledge of the country’s cinema, this disproportionate focus on films made only during the past 25 years or so is narrow-minded, and ultimately damaging to the cinematic history of Iran as a whole. It is also politically motivated. It is easy for European audiences for instance, or more specifically critics, to seize upon these films, citing their unexpected (and oft-belaboured) simplicity and - God give me strength! - ‘humanism’ as a refreshing alternative to violent mainstream (read ‘Hollywood’) cinema, and to undermine the current demonization of Iran in mainstream media. To a certain extent this is important, especially at time when America is strategically positioning itself for war against Iran should it prove politically and economically opportune. But some (admittedly, most of them biased and disgustingly wealthy ex-Shah supporters living in ‘Tehrangeles’) would argue, justifiably, that this lends legitimacy to the corrupt and oppressive Islamic regime in Iran. Moreover, I would argue that not only does it give weight to the accusation that is continually levelled at contemporary Iranian cinema, that it constantly panders to Western Orientalist fantasies of Iran, but also that it alienates a significant proportion of the movie-going public all around the world, who perceive Iranian films to be constantly regurgitating the same themes over and over and over again. And who can blame them? After all, who wants to talk about the representation of masculinity in the ‘tough guy’ or luti genre of the 60s and 70s (big up to Behrouz Vossoughi incidentally, the great Iranian actor) when it’s much more topical and fashionable to discuss the ‘politics of the veil’? Who wants to analysis implicit criticism of the Shah’s regime in pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, when it’s much more convenient to belabour platitudes about symbolic criticism of the current regime? And who can even be bothered thinking about the influence of other ‘national’ cinemas upon Iranian cinema when there’s some doe-eyed kid on the screen whining and pissing and moaning about losing their favourite toy or pet? (Case in point: in the Film Museum in Iran, I saw a movie poster for an Iranian ‘peplum’ (the term used in European cinema in the Seventies for a historical epic) of all things! Unfortunately the title presently escapes me.)
The fate of the great Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless illustrates my point. Saless made only two films in Iran; A Simple Incident (1973) and Still Life (1974), before falling out of favour with the Shah and going into exile in Germany while working on his never-to-be-completed third production, Quarantine. Despite this, Saless is very much the ‘father’ of contemporary Iranian film, these two films representing landmarks in the history of Iranian cinema. A Simple Incident was one the first feature films to use a child as its main protagonist, (minus the sickening and patronizing sentimentality that pervades so many contemporary Iranian child-narratives&#33. Another example would be Bahram Beizai’s short film The Journey (1972). Other directors like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf and Naderi would soon follow suit, with mixed results. Still Life on the other hand, which tells the story of a lonely railway worker and his wife, and their expendability during a time of rapid industrialization in Iran, introduced the minimalistic dialogue, (at times excruciatingly) slow camera movement, and methodical directing style that would become the hallmark of almost every other internationally popular Iranian director. Saless’s influence upon today’s directors cannot be underestimated, and yet he is hardly ever mentioned in any official histories you may read about Iranian (or even German) cinema. (Saless went on to make a number of acclaimed and award-winning films in Germany). Because he doesn’t fit neatly into the way in which Iran wants to market its films internationally, or the way in which international audiences currently receive or consume the product that is ‘Iranian Cinema’, he is forgotten.
The second half of Saless’s career as it were, in Germany, also brings to light another important-yet-neglected fact; that many of the most interesting and exciting Iranian films are being made by directors who live outside Iran. Much fuss was made when Majidi’s The Colour of Paradise (one of those overbearingly sentimental kiddie-films I was referring to earlier) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1999. But who was actually the first ever Iranian to win an Oscar? It was Reza Parsa, one of the leading directors of contemporary Swedish cinema, for his short film Never, starring the famous Iranian actress Susan Taslimi, who you may have seen in Beizai’s popular film Bashu, the Little Stranger. Taslimi herself has also just directed her first feature film, All Hell Let Loose, about the travails of an Iranian family living in Sweden. Houchang Allahyari is another prominent Iranian director currently working in Austria. And this isn’t even mentioning the multitude of Iranian filmmakers currently working in Canada and North America, where Naderi has recently completed his ‘Manhattan’ trilogy (comprised of Manhattan By Numbers, A,B,C...Manhattan and Marathon), which explores his apparent love-hate relationship with New York.
I’m aware the overall tone of this article has been one of jaded cynicism, but please don’t think that I’m not enthusiastic about those films which actually come from the country Iran itself. Despite my frustration with the way these films are marketed and received internationally, I love (most of) these films too. Kiarostami’s most recent film, Ten (which received an insanely long run at the ICA), was absolutely groundbreaking, not only in terms of the necessary progression it represented in Kiarostami’s own directing style, but also in its startling, non-clichéd portrayal of its female protagonist, and the milestone it represented in the ongoing technological evolution currently changing the face of cinema worldwide (it was filmed entirely using two digital cameras attached to the top of the dashboard of a car). Panahi’s latest film, the brilliant crime drama Crimson Gold (written by Kiarostami) is one of the most accurate and unflinching depictions of Tehran I’ve ever seen in any Iranian film.
I only suggest that maybe the next time when you’re flicking through the latest copy of Empire or your daily newspaper, and you come across a review of the latest Iranian movie to reach our shores, before you eagerly plough through the review or turn the page over in disgust, you should ask yourself the following question: just what is ‘Iranian Cinema’, and what exactly makes an Iranian film ‘Iranian’? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as you might think it is.
Written By Christopher Gow

Iranian house style

Here come the Makhmalbafs. Are they geniuses or is it down to dad, asks Hannah McGill

Samira Makhmalbaf's third feature At 5 in the Afternoon confirms her status as one of the most iconic auteurs of current world cinema – bathed in the reflected glory of a prestigious family name, admired as a gifted and original film-maker in her own right and adored for her rarity as a Middle Eastern female director still shy of her twenty-fifth birthday. The story of an ambitious young woman pursuing an education in post-war Afghanistan, At 5 in the Afternoon was the first film to be shot in Kabul after the American bombardment. It premiered at Cannes in 2003 and was awarded the Jury Prize: six years after Abbas Kiarostami cemented the global standing of Iranian cinema by winning the Palme d'Or for A Taste of Cherry and three years after the threefold triumph that saw Samira take her first Jury Prize for Blackboards and Hassan Yektapanah and Bahman Ghobadi share the Caméra d'Or for Diomeh and A Time for Drunken Horses respectively. Of these three young directors, it was the photogenic Samira who proved the biggest PR draw, with journalistic curiosity about her personality and situation occasionally outstripping interest in her films. If Mohsen Makhmalbaf was one of the most prominent figures of the Iranian New Wave, his eldest child has lent that ongoing movement an appealing new face (and an appropriately youthful one for a country where 60 per cent of the population is under 25). Meanwhile, fans who'd wondered if there were any more like Samira at home got their answer in 15-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf's Joy of Madness , a documentary of the trials Samira endured while preparing to shoot in Kabul.

At 5 in the Afternoon (the title comes from a sorrowful Lorca poem about a bullfight) begins as a simple tale of ambition flourishing against the odds: 20-year-old Noqreh (Agheleh Rezaee) sneaks out to attend school, keeping her desire to learn secret from her traditionalist father, and after a classroom discussion decides she wants to become the next president of Afghanistan. She enlists the help of a young poet (Razi Mohebi), but their efforts to co-ordinate a campaign are interrupted by more pressing concerns such as the constant search for new lodgings and the health of Noqreh's sister-in-law's baby, who is wasting away for lack of food. Deprived of _adequate shelter and sustenance, the optimistic Noqreh faces relentless obstacles, and what began as an endearing youthful whim becomes a metaphor for the denial of potential and the suppression of hope. Samira Makhmalbaf's ambitious and complex film provides a melancholy portrait of a society in freefall – leavened by a hint of romance and flashes of almost screwball humour. Meanwhile Joy of Madness is a frank and fascinating record of its pre-production and chaotic casting process as the Makhmalbafs forcefully persuade their chosen performers to participate.

Born to Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his late wife Fatemeh Meshkini in 1980 and 1988 respectively, Samira and Hana dropped out of conventional education to enrol in the Makhmalbaf Film School. Here their father was their tutor, classes took place in the family home, and their select band of classmates was composed of friends and family including their brother Maysam and their stepmother Marzieh Meshkini. As Mohsen said in 2001, with typical tongue-in-cheek hauteur, "Five years ago, while I had been the most prolific Iranian film-maker, with 14 feature films, three shorts, 28 books and 22 editing credits over a 14-year career, I stopped making films and decided to make film-makers." Of course, that Makhmalbaf père stopped making films isn't strictly accurate: Kandahar (2001), the story of an Afghan woman's fraught attempts to return to her homeland, became one of his most admired works, and he has collaborated with Samira on the scripts and editing of all her features. But that he has successfully "made" film-makers (as he so tellingly puts it) seems beyond doubt – as Samira's three _features, Marzieh's The Day I Became a Woman (a three-part examination of the stages of female maturity in Iran made in 2000) and Hana's Joy of Madness attest.

The Makhmalbaf family's production-line app-roach to film education is surely without a contemporary equivalent. Fearful of charges of nepotism, members of prominent Hollywood dynasties tend to channel their energies into distancing themselves from one another rather than into collaboration. (Imagine the cynical response if Sofia Coppola accepted as much open help and endorsement from her father as Samira does.) Perhaps Claude Chab-rol's repeated inclusion of family members within his creative workforce provides the closest parallel, though no other Chabrol has established an independent reputation let alone become a fixture on the red carpets of international film festivals.

The self-conscious and open interweaving of the Makhmalbaf family members' projects builds a united front of creative confidence and drive, while the making of each new film generates fresh myths and stories. Both Hana's Joy of Madness and Maysam's How Samira Made 'The Blackboard' provide rich real-life backstories for the fiction films they accompany – as well as assisting in the construction of the nascent cult of Samira. Indeed, with such a wealth of publicity material and background information on offer, it becomes impossible to divorce Samira's personality and the trials she endures in realising her projects from the finished films. In How Samira Made 'The Blackboard' she's a whirlwind of irrepressible physicality, herding massive crowds with the aid of a loudhailer, clinging to an actor's back to ensure he moves on time, clapping her hand over another's mouth to prevent him from speaking out of turn. Joy of Madness suggests increased fame has brought increased attitude: Samira's casting process is a kaleidoscopic and unpredictable onslaught of charm, aggression, hau-ghty disdain and shameless emotional blackmail.

Samira herself is quietly scathing about the awed fascination that has greeted her entrance on to the international stage. "They say, 'You are young', so I would have to be old. 'You are a woman', so I would have to be a man. 'You're from Iran', so I would have to be from somewhere else. And some people told me, 'You're very small.' So I would have to be a fat old man to make a movie!" Yet while the previous generation of Iranian directors had to wait for the world to catch up before they were fêted outside their own country, Samira's canonisation is happening before our very eyes, with her image and status being deconstructed even as they are formed. It's a set of attitudes that was hinted at in Kiarostami's Close-Up (1989), which relates in semi-documentary style the real-life case of a Mohsen Makhmalbaf fan arrested for impersonating his hero.

Having matured in the 1980s and 1990s when European and American film-makers were already preoccupied with deconstruction, reflexivity and the cult of the auteur, modern Iranian cinema reached the wider world with directors such as Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, like Godard and Truffaut before them, self-conscious icons as preoccupied with the examination of their own fame, creativity and philosophy of representation as with straightforward storytelling or political concerns. This engagement with the artistic process is parabled in Makhmalbaf's romantic folktale Gabbeh (1996) in which a woman reveals the love story behind the images she's woven into a carpet. Here the weaving, dyeing and drying of the carpet all form part of the narrative, rendering the artefact and the act of its creation inseparable – just as within the Makhmalbaf universe every work of art contains the tale of its own construction, the creative process generates its own stories and the artist embodies her own work.

Thus Joy of Madness increases the socio-political potency of At 5 in the Afternoon by revealing troubling parallels between the actors and characters. When a beggar family lend their sick baby to be filmed having been reassured it won't be killed, the comforting distance conferred by the cinematic illusion collapses as we understand that the dangerously ill baby of the story is little more healthy in real life. And the family's fear of the film-makers demonstrates the same gulf between the empowered artist and the disenfranchised masses as haunts Kiarostami's work, particularly 1990's Homework , an extended interview with schoolchildren about authority and study in which he inadvertently terrifies one of his young subjects. Samira asks Hana to stop shooting only once; Hana disobeys. "I tried not to bother Samira, and not to intervene in her job – but still to do my job," she says. "I told myself, I have to shoot all the time, and not miss one minute. If I miss a minute, I have not said all of the truth."

So are Samira and Hana simply weavers for their father's wool? Samira defends the family tradition of collaboration – "In a world where everyone is separating, having a family like this is a good model" – but says she wouldn't rule out working without her father in the future. "Sometimes I think I would like another person's ideas, especially in the editing." Hana, meanwhile, rejects the idea with guileless certainty: "Samira is a girl and my father is a man; they are two different persons. Samira sees the world in one way, my father sees it another way. If you gave the same scenario to both of them, they would each make it in their own way."

But even Hana would surely have to acknowledge elements of a Makhmalbaf house style: the conscious politicisation of personal narratives; a poetic symbolism that privileges fleeting moments and physical details almost to the point of surreal fetishisation; moral, political and narrative ambiguities that demand the spectator's active interpretation; the deployment of non-professional performers. Yet Samira's personal poise and confidence bespeak a powerful intellectual independence and her age and gender as well as her artistic idiosyncrasies set her films apart from her father's (in a manner that might stand further comparison with Coppola père and fille ). Samira is the same age as post-revolutionary Iran and has lived her life in a political and cultural climate strikingly different from that which turned her father into a teenage guerrilla. At the age when Mohsen took up arms against the regime of Shah Pahlavi, enduring imprisonment and torture for assaulting a policeman, Samira registered her own dissent with her first feature The Apple (1997), which enlisted the true story of two little girls imprisoned by their over-protective father to serve as an allegory for the restrictions placed on all Iranians, particularly women. As Hamid Dabashi puts it in Close-Up: Iranian cinema past, present and future : "Mohsen Makhmalbaf may have taught his daughter how to make films, but she has taught her father how to liberate a nation." Samira acknowledges the irony of a country where women are veiled and oppressed producing a prolific female director, phrasing her explanation in characteristically poetic terms: "Iranian women are like fresh-water streams: the more pressure is applied, the more force they show when they are freed."

Hana, meanwhile, found her gender and youth an advantage when shooting Joy of Madness . "I had a better situation than my father. If my father goes to a house, all the people are angry because he's a man, and he's big. Because I was a young girl, they didn't take me seriously; I was just a kid with a camera." Though she insists that "I was making a film thro-ugh my own point of view; if somebody else made this film, it would be totally different", she's aware of the advantages she inherited along with the family name: "I was born into a family with a great love of cinema. All the time, even when we were going to sleep, our father was speaking about cinema, and teaching all the time, teaching everybody."

Like her father, Samira sees her own role as a film-maker as both inspirational and pedagogic. "Because I had a better situation, better opportunities, compared to other women, I always feel a responsibility for these women. I think I have to do something." And perhaps she has succeeded: certainly it's notable that of the significant Iranian films released since The Apple , Jafar Panahi's _ The Circle (2000), Makhmalbaf's Kandahar and Kiarostami's Ten (2002) focus almost exclusively on female experience. Indeed, there's a case to be made that it is male characters who now seem 'veiled' and ambiguous in Iranian cinema.

But unfortunately, several of the progressive Iranian films fêted by international critics and festival juries are never seen by the people they depict. Panahi's The Circle and Crimson Gold (2003), Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Time of Love (1991) and The Nights of Zayandeh-Rood (1991), Hana's short The Day My Aunt Was Ill and even How Samira Made 'The Blackboard' (because she is seen with too low a neckline) are all banned in Iran. Indeed, local cinema programmes are dominated by Bollywood musicals, Hollywood action movies and Iranian genre films, primarily comedies, violent action pieces and bloody war thrillers such as Ahmad-Reza Darvish's Duel , set during the Iran-Iraq war and made with a record budget of some $1.2 million. Yet there are signs that controls are being relaxed and certainly this year's Fajr International Film Festival (where Duel won numerous awards) strove for international recognition as never before, launching its own website and welcoming western distributors for the first time. The Iranian ministry of culture maintains a contradictory stance towards its international stars, celebrating such renowned names as Kiarostami, Panahi and the Makhmalbafs as success stories while remaining suspicious of their work, with films often cleared for shooting only to be banned for release.

In effect, it's as if there were two Iranian cinemas: one composed of thoughtful, quietly subversive films that earn praise abroad, the other of safe commercial product aimed at the domestic market. Perhaps it's not such an unusual set-up – after all, the disenfranchised working-class teenagers of Europe hardly flock to see Lilya 4-Ever or Sweet Sixteen . And, like Benazir Bhutto – Noqreh's role model in At 5 in the Afternoon – Samira Makhmalbaf provides inspiration by her very presence. (Even Empress Farah Pahlavi, widow of Shah Pahlavi, said in a 2003 interview: "When I see Samira Makhmalbaf once again awarded in Cannes, I feel proud.") This positive legacy is neatly illustrated in How Samira Made 'The Blackboard' when one of the formerly cowed prisoners of The Apple declares she now wants to become a film director. As Samira herself acknowledges: "I think at the beginning one of the most important things was me, was the story of me – a woman from an Islamic country making movies. My situation isn't normal in Iran, but things are getting better. So many Iranian women would like to become film-makers."

'At 5 in the Afternoon' is released on 16 April

Iran 2000
Peter Rist, [email protected]

April 1, 2001

Although it may be more appropriate to call the 1990s the "decade of Iranian cinema," since that is when important Iranian film directors like Abbas Kiarostami and father and daughter Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf received international recognition, it seems to me that by designating 2000 "the year of Iranian cinema" we recognize an incredible diversity of interests and forms in that troubled nation's cinema, hitherto unseen.

I have been following the coming-of-age of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema for quite a few years now. I first became aware of its existence and the Iranian people's fervent interest in film shortly after I arrived in Montreal to take-up a post at Concordia University. It was mid-winter, early February 1990, and I barely managed to secure a ticket for Bahram Beizai's Bashu, the Little Stranger, a film that was already 3 years old, and yet was able to fill a 700 seat auditorium (with about 699 Canadian-Iranian immigrants and refugees, ..., and myself). Whereas Montreal's "Festival of New Cinema" regularly showcased new films from Iran, my next memorable encounter with this major, resurgent cinema came in September 1992 during Toronto's Festival of Festivals. I saw a Kiarostami film for the first time, Zendegi va Digar Hich (then entitled in English, Life and Nothing More), and it was love at first sight. From the very first shot, with the camera viewing cars stopping at and passing a tollbooth, perpendicularly, as if from another booth or a surveillance position, I knew I was watching something unique. From then on, I actively sought out screenings of his films, and have yet to be disappointed with any of them. It took me a while longer to warm up to Makhmalbaf, though. In the same February, 1990 series at the Concordia University Hall Building auditorium, I had seen this director's Dastforoush (The Peddler, 1987), again with a near-capacity crowd. But, at that time, I was not impressed by what I found to be an excessively exaggerated form of surrealist melodrama. I was finally convinced of his importance with a retrospective mounted by the Conservatory of Cinematographic Art at Concordia University in January/February 1997. That same year, the World Film festival featured Iranian cinema and Majid Majidi won the first of his two Grand Prix d'Amériques as director of Bachehaye Aseman (Children of Heaven). And, with Canadian distributors, especially Mongrel Media in Ontario willing to take a chance on Iranian films, the future looked promising at the beginning of the new millenium.

The first opportunity to watch a number of Iranian films in 2000 came with the 24th Hong Kong International Film Festival, which showed Kiarostami's latest, Bad ma ra khabad bord (The Wind Will Carry Us) and "Children of Paradise," a series of seven features and three short films made for and about children or young adults.[1] Imagine my surprise when I found myself in the company of numerous Chinese children with their teachers, who were making daytime trips to watch films in Farsi with English sub-titles!! Doubtless, youngsters in Iran watch their own films, but this was the first time I had ever seen more than a handful of school children in an auditorium ready to watch some of the best "childrens' films" in the world. The series gave me the opportunity to see Amir Naderi's Davande (The Runner, 1985) on the big screen. Previously, Iranian students of mine had enabled me to view parts of this important work on terrible quality video copies, but it was really exciting to finally see this dynamic, seminal film produced by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. The story is very simple: Amiro (Madjid Niroumand), apparently orphaned or abandoned by his parents, has to survive on his own devices. He lives in a broken down, landlocked old fishing boat, and collects cans and bottles to sell so that he can eat. Naderi travelled and shot footage all over his country to create an amazingly unified geography of an oceanside wasteland, where nothing seems to grow. In a dog-eat-dog world, Amiro has to fight other boys for the garbage apparently thrown from oil tankers, culminating in a brilliant final scene where he runs against his foes in order to reach a solitary block of ice set against a backdrop of fire. The Runner is a literal title, and the end of the film presents a very positive image of Amiro's sheer joy at winning his prize after running himself into the ground. Clearly, this is the film which injected camera movement into