Wendy & Lucy

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJjOnz8I8oA[/youtube]

Old Joy

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL1X_7jIcIM[/youtube]

Other films in the series include River of Grass and Kelly Reichardt’s short films Ode, Travis, and Then a Year. These films screen as a part of the Kelly Reichardt: Off the Beaten Track Regis Dialogue and Retrospective. Visit Walkerart.org for more information.

by Sara Saljoughi

Tehroun screens on April 28^th at 7:30 pm as part of the Walker’s Views from Iran series.

Tehroun is a captivating directorial debut by Nader T. Homayoun that is likely to surprise anyone who walks into the viewing with a preconceived notion of what “Iranian cinema” is as a whole.  Homayoun made the feature-length documentary Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution, this is his first feature-length narrative.  The title of the film refers to the colloquial pronunciation used by Iranians when saying “Tehran.”

Critics have called the film a “crime thriller,” in reference to the film’s narrative which follows the actions of Ibrahim (Ali Ebdali), who uses a rented baby to gain sympathy while begging for money on the street and who is on the run from a gang chief the rest of the time that we are with him.

The film’s pacing is a far cry from Iranian films like Taste of Cherry; it is fast-paced and sheds light on hidden corners and subsections of Iran’s capital.

Homayoun’s Tehran is stricken with poverty and his characters do what they can to get by: violence, begging, smuggling, prostitution.

Fortunately, Homayoun doesn’t succumb to the temptations of what an Iranian-style Slumdog Millionaire might bring him in terms of fame and success. His narrative keeps us guessing and gives no easy rewards.

As such, his particular representation of the city, via the travails of Ibrahim, is an open and blank-faced exploration of what is merely suggested in other Iranian films.

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Sara Saljoughi is a graduate student in Comparative Studies in Discourse & Society at the U of M. Her areas of research are cinema, critical theory, Iranian studies and postcolonial theory. She has published film and music reviews in Exclaim!, Broken Pencil and Foxy Digitalis. She blogs at http://sarainamerica.blogspot.com/

by Sara Saljoughi

Heiran screens on April 25^th at 2:00 pm, as part of the Walker’s Views from Iran series.

Heiran is the first feature length narrative film written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Shalizeh Arefpour and produced by visiting filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad.  This is a film that contains what appears to be a simple narrative, and one that has been worked out many times in the history of world cinema: a story of love interrupted and troubled by immigration legalities.

Part of Arefpour’s success with Heiran is her attention to social issues in contemporary Iran, particularly in relation to the millions of refugees living within its borders.

Set in rural Iran, Heiran traces the evolution of the relationship between Mahi, a seventeen year old girl, and Heiran, a young Afghan student who works in her village.

In one of  the film’s earliest scenes, the camera captures a small opening in the wall of a refugee holding center in Iran.  As we peer through the opening together, Mahi says “They are all strangers, no familiar faces. Where am I in their story? Beginning, middle, or end?” At this moment, the tone is one of curiosity and perhaps even melancholy, but later in the film, we return to the same position. We, together with Mahi, look at a roomful of male Afghan refugees, but the tone has shifted and there is something menacing about the men, causing Mahi (and us) to only feel desperation about the situation at hand.

This oscillation of feelings about the “stranger” (Gharib in Persian) is arguably what structures the film and can be read as a statement about Iran’s complicated position on being a so-called “host” country to millions of Afghan refugees and migrant workers.

While Heiran contains some elements of Iranian cinema that are very familiar to Western viewers, such as a rural setting and a storyline following young people, it also shifts that perspective by engaging a narrative about something – immigration – that is often only thought of as something Iranians do throughout the world, not something that is dealt with as a domestic issue in Iran itself. As such, one of Heiran’s contributions is the fact that it speaks to a large misconception about who immigrates, who emigrates, and which countries do most of the hosting.

For example, it may come as a surprise to learn that throughout much of Afghanistan’s history of turmoil in the twentieth century, including during the rule of the Taliban, Iran was the logical destination for emigrating Afghans.

Heiran is one narrative that speaks to the complex and troubled relationship between Iranian society and Afghan immigrants and refugees.  With all its moments of young, idealistic love against the background of an idyllic, rural setting (including some amazing sequences of bicycle riding), Heiran also reveals the cynical, suspicious and often times racist attitude towards Afghans in Iranian society. It is a strong film that suggests a promising future in cinema for Arefpour.

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Sara Saljoughi is a graduate student in Comparative Studies in Discourse & Society at the U of M. Her areas of research are cinema, critical theory, Iranian studies and postcolonial theory. She has published film and music reviews in Exclaim!, Broken Pencil and Foxy Digitalis. She blogs at http://sarainamerica.blogspot.com/

by Sara Saljoughi

Women Without Men (Zanaan-e bedun-e mardan) has two screenings as part of the Walker’s Views from Iran series:  April 16^th at 7:30 pm and April 17^th at 7:30 pm. The film will be introduced by director Shirin Neshat and collaborator Shoja Azari on April 16. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

Shirin Neshat’s first feature film is an adaptation of Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel, Women without Men.  Neshat’s fascination with Parsipur’s novel and her own exploration of the literary work’s intrinsic visual qualities were evident in her Zarin Series (2005), a collection of photographs inspired by one of the novel and film’s main characters, Zarin.  Women without Men hones in on the life of four women – Zarin, Faezeh, Munis and Fakhri – in one of the most politically tumultuous times in modern Iranian history, the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Neshat’s adaptation of Parsipur’s novel manages to perform a striking interpretation of the written work’s elements of magical realism, something that Parsipur has continued with her latest novel Men from Various Civilizations.

The film’s muted palette, which is at moments reminiscent of Kodachrome photographs, takes us away from “realism,” something which has almost come to be expected from Iranian filmmakers, into a world that is seemingly discordant with the one we know, both in the realm of the physical and the emotive.

The visual interpretation of Parsipur’s fantastical world is evoked from the film’s earliest moments. We hear a woman’s voice say, “Now I’ll have silence, silence and nothing. And I thought, the only freedom from pain is to be free from the world,” while the camera follows a stream into one of the film’s most important spaces, a metaphorical orchard. The world from which the woman (who we later know as Munis) seeks to be free is not the ruddy, wet earth and blooming trees of the orchard, but the walls and interiors of life in Tehran, the world of men and women.

Like other films in the Views from Iran series, Women without Men employs a marginal space removed from the characters’ usual habitat; the orchard is a space of healing, regeneration and quiet away from the chaos of the political changes gripping the country and the demands on each of the four women.

In the summer of 2009 Women without Men won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival while the first rumblings of what could become great political change occurred yet again in Iran. In photographs from the festival, Neshat and members of the cast (including Parsipur, who has a great cameo as the madam of a brothel) stood on the red carpet, their green bracelets poignantly reaching out in solidarity with the protestors in Iran.

Neshat’s adaptation of Women without Men is significant because it provides a compelling psychological account of a moment in history, via the experiences of women, against the backdrop of great events.

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Sara Saljoughi is a graduate student in Comparative Studies in Discourse & Society at the U of M. Her areas of research are cinema, critical theory, Iranian studies and postcolonial theory. She has published film and music reviews in Exclaim!, Broken Pencil and Foxy Digitalis. She blogs at http://sarainamerica.blogspot.com/

by Sara Saljoughi

Asghar Farhadi’s latest film About Elly screens on Friday, April 9^th at 7:30 pm as part of the Walker’s Views from Iran series.

About Elly has a deceptively simple premise: a group of middle-class Tehranis go on a short vacation to the Caspian Sea.  Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) is the most gregarious of the group, as well as its leader, and her main objective for the trip is to play matchmaker to her daughter’s kindergarten teacher Elly (Taraneh Alidousti) and her friend Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) who is newly divorced and visiting from Germany.

By setting the film in Shomal (which literally means “north” and is how that region of Iran is known to the rest of the country) Farhadi is able to work with a narrative that is already structured both psychologically inside and physically outside the imaginary of Tehran’s urban milieu.

The seaside towns of Shomal have long been a popular vacation spot for Tehran’s middle and upper classes thus as a destination for the group of friends, the region is a site that allows them to escape the conventions of Tehran society while also recreating them in very distinct ways.

Elly is the key figure through whom this simultaneous action of familiarization and estrangement operates.  For much of the film, she is a  stranger; as an outsider, she does not understand the group’s jokes and she resists their attempts at collegial intimacy.  Elly’s position outside the group is also responsible for a general lack of interest in her, other than the friends teasing and prodding Ahmad to ascertain his opinion of her.

This all changes in a single moment, catapulting Elly to the center of the film’s action, though she maybe no longer visible in that action. The moment she is physically removed from the screen, all of the other characters’ actions revolve around the idea of Elly.

It is here that traces of classism and moral judgements about Elly’s sexuality emerge; the fact that she was not known suddenly becomes of utmost importance.

Strongly reminiscent of Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Asghar Farhadi’s film poses difficult questions about truth, responsibility, social survival and what happens to relationships in the aftermath of crisis. Golshifteh Farahani, a rising star in Iranian cinema, makes a stunning turn as a conniving Queen Bee character who positions herself as innocent and benevolent, which allows her to make a variety of decisions that catapult the rest of the group into tragedy.

About Elly garnered Farhadi the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival and follows on the heels of his acclaimed  Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbeh Suri ), which also focuses on strained relationships among the Tehran elite. About Elly is a powerful opener for the Walker’s Views from Iran series and should not be missed.

Sara Saljoughi is a graduate student in Comparative Studies in Discourse & Society at the U of M. Her areas of research are cinema, critical theory, Iranian studies and postcolonial theory. She has published film and music reviews in Exclaim!, Broken Pencil and Foxy Digitalis. She blogs at http://sarainamerica.blogspot.com/