The 2023 Persian Film Festival (what happened to our Iranian Film Festivals?) has had a soft launch. I would guess that, like the Poles, whose event has a similar low profile, they have concluded that they waste their time promoting to the wide public in a city with no movie enthusiast structure, and concentrate on the original language community.

Co-directed by Ehsan Mirhosseini and Bardia Yadegari, who plays the lead, Mantagheye payani / District Terminal is an overseas prize winner which was also selected here.    

This one gives us an account of double duty director Yadegar playing shaven headed author Peyman, trying to edit his book in the apartment with his Ariel Dorfman, Jim Morrison and Ingmar Bergman pictures on the wall. His encouraging teenage step daughter, back from the 'States where it cost so much to send her, tells him that as Poet, stepfather and junkie, he is the perfect combination. Yagedar's wife, who he married in the hopes of getting himself a U.S. visa, skypes from there with a different character summary listing his faults, including failure to learn English and prepare himself for employment in the U.S., with the application she claimed she lodged for him proving a lie. 

His mother Farideh Azadi is no more approving, questioning his fate when she will not be there to protect his interests, and his circle of friends are also dismissive. The neighbor, smoking with his wife on the roof of the ground floor building in the court of their intimidating seven floors, concrete slab apartment block, is more concerned about the fate of the country’s forests being destroyed by the run-off from the tons of garbage dumped there, taking visitor groups and giving A.V. presentations, which Yadegari walks out off. One Gone With the Wind recalling shot draws back from the Eco-warrior stretched out on a mountain of rubbish a mile wide. 

A more successful acquaintance is contemptuous of Yadegari’s starving artist lifestyle (“I have money which means I have everything”) while another friend has picked up an easy spot being an official censor (Ayatollah photos on his wall), telling our hero that, without official consent, he will waste his time self publishing the book hand corrected pages of which are spread across the apartment floor and his Addicts Anonymous group, which congratulates members when they go twenty four hours without using, doesn’t seem to be much help. Did I mention that the people living in the next block fled their building under cover of night?

To complete his Job-like existence, though he brushes compulsively, Yagedari’s teeth are falling out  Our hero has to be revived when he collapses in the shower prefiguring a heart attack. The sky fills with a fireball.                                            

The unrelenting grimness is distanced by the film form - the closest to a completely impressionist movie I’ve encountered, with the story related in unconnected scenes, sometimes a single brief shot, each containing further information. The blonde girl lover sings in English. Downwards camera angles repeatedly place the lead in his desolate urban setting. We get stock footage clips of faceless workers advancing in yellow hazmat suits .

If you want a comparison, this is better judged and more involving than the similarly doom laden Beau Is Afraid now in wide release and likely to circulate far longer.

This grim picture of the Iranian scene is made by one of their own production companies in collaboration with the Germans. 

 

A similar stretch as a prize winner in a Persian Film Festival, Ankabut-e moqaddas / Holy Spider is a Danish Oscar contender made in Jordan. These transplant movies are not new. Russian Fedor Otzep made an impressive Brothers Karamazov in Germany, German Fritz Lang shot Manhunt in Hollywood or think American Edward Dmytrick’s Give Us this Day with its Brooklyn reconstructed in a British studio. They do however seem to be a phenomenon of today’s Islamic states - The Swallows of Kabul. Though born in Tehran, director Ali Abbasi, who has drawn some attention for his previous Shelley and Border, is offering content that would not have been possible on his home turf.

Holy Spider - Zar Amir-Ebrahimi & Arash Ashtiani center.

 Holy Spider is frequently called a film noir or compared to Se7en but, rather than Zodiak, its subject resembles the Subway Vigilante, who the U.S. police were said to be reluctant about arresting while he was doing their job for them. In this film we get a serial killer who operated in Iran's Holy City Masshad, dominated by the AImam Reza Sunit Shrine glimpsed briefly. The victims were female prostitutes throttled with their head scarves, giving an added resonance. Among the most marginalised members of society, they were reviled for their association with vice - sex work and drugs, here opium. The film’s thriller elements, crime, menace in dark, mean streets, play against his society's ambivalence about the killer

 Arriving from the capital, where she acquired a scandalous reputation by resisting the advances of a superior, comes chador-wearing journalist Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who immediately runs into a hotel clerk unwilling to honor her reservation because she is a woman alone. Our heroine rapidly puts him in his place. 

Her local newspaper contact Arash Ashtiani even has recordings of the calls the killer makes him after his crimes. The colleague is sympathetic but he already knows the demands of the officials, police and clerics who have to be mobilised. Early on we see in grisly detail genial husband and father Mehdi Bajestani collecting street women on his motor bike and taking them back to his family home to murder them, while his wife and children are away. Once the wife's unexpected return means he has to carry on with a victim's foot still visible in the carpet he has her wrapped with.

Events are obviously going to funnel down to Amir-Ebrahimi mounting the killer's motor bike with a clasp knife in her bag, a potential victim. The unpredictable element is how the official structure will deal with the crime of a respected and well connected citizen, something intended to expose the decay of their society. The TV monologue by the killer's teen aged son is chilling.

The film's characteristic limited colour palette, strong on greens and browns, and skin defects emphasised by an absence of make up, all go with the grim subject matter. Leads Amir-Ebrahimi & Bajestani are imposing in a strong cast. This one makes its point and holds attention.

Ali Behrad's Tasavor / Imagine, the director’s first film, turns out to be a curious example of movie making gone astray. A misguided Iranian attempt at complex structure has leading star, the maturely glamorous Leila Hatami (A Separation) and Mehrdad Sedigan as passenger and cab driver,  the film's only significant characters, with the leads apparently doubling as support in the other's flash back episodes. 

We first see him driving her to a hill where she disperses her brother’s ashes (“In the end, we gave him to the wind”) with the flamboyant gesture undermined. “I’ve got my brother in my eye.” She later turns up in a blue wig, hiring the cab and making up there as a singer entertainer, and again on foot in her bridal veil, after being dumped on the wedding day and threatening to use the alimony she’s due to make the groom turn up for the reception. There’s discussion of a dating App. (“If I’m in this situation, it’s due to shy guys like you”) and she argues “It was better to be a second wife than nothing,” though only getting a 400 ft square apartment in the deal.

This is spaced with glimpses into their outside lives, like the bakery where where he talks about fancying the counter girl. She describes the ashes scene, apparently not recognising him and the film ends with Sedigan alone, undoing the knotted hair she has admired - and weeping. This gets to be confusing and takes all the considerable charm of the beautiful people leads to keep attention.

Minimal glimpses of the Iranian scene. Nice camerawork from Alireza Barazandeh catches touches like the heart shaped red helium balloon escaping the confines of the car and lifting away.

The three films which I saw, of which two were expatriot entries, don't add much to knowledge of the Iranian film scene or the country they depict. The film makers, who once attracted world attention there, were not represented.  Several have been silenced but still we have glimpses of dissatisfaction with the restraints of the currently challenged, religion based leadership. 

Barrie Pattison 2023