IT’S WINTER (Rafi Pitts, 2006)

Writer-director Rafi Pitts (New Voices/New Visions prize, Palm Springs) has turned Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s story “Safar” into an assured piece of visionary cinema—one that captures both a rhythm of life and the depth of despair and alienation in one segment of today’s Iran, an economically stressed industrial suburb. Its joint protagonists, one who has left town to find desperately needed work and another who has come to the same town in a desperate attempt to find work, are each identified with the other on another score: Mokhtar has temporarily abandoned his younger wife, Khatoun, and their little girl for his offscreen pursuit of employment and wages; Marhab, a clumsy worker who nonetheless boasts he can “fix anything,” is attracted to Khatoun. When Mokhtar leaves, it is bleak winter; when he returns, it is the next winter, he is missing a leg, and he cannot return home, still having no money, and Marhab now having “taken” Khatoun. Pride prevents Mokhtar’s even seeing his daughter. One thing more must be noted: it is Khatoun, we learn, who insisted that they build their house rather than—Mokhtar’s preference—invest their money. Mokhtar feels doubly left out in the cold.
     Zemestan is a mournful, unsentimental portrait of an undone family. Nor can another family replace it, for Marhab’s prospects scarcely exceed what Mokhtar’s were. Youth bestows on Marhab little more than pluck and edgy expectations. One would not be going too far to glean from the believability of Pitts’s film that Iran, as it is now constituted, is a doomed nation. Wedded to her sewing machine and her work ethic, only Khatoun, as well as her daughter, seems to have a future—in an Iran yet to be.
     Mohammad Davudi’s fine color cinematography took prizes at Valladolid and Fajr.

SWIMMING IN NEBRASKA (Jon Jost, 2010)

Jon Jost describes Swimming in Nebraska, which he shot in digital video in Lincoln mostly in 2006, as “a kind of essay/meditation on the mid-west, creative work, artistry, life, the cosmos and, I’ll be damned, I don’t really know.” It is punctuated by overhead shots of Man alone in an indoor pool, swimming laps, while a whispering voice is heard counting these, suggesting the mortal breaths of the individual, here in his mid-60s, amidst, ironically, a display of athletic endurance.
     Early on, we see a woman conducting the Eastridge Presbyterian Church Choral Choir, which for a stretch turns invisible, making the haunting singing a disembodied harmony of heavenly voices as abstract imagery fills the screen. Suddenly, the triplicate image of a pair of hands at a piano keyboard—later, we also see a violinist—fills a horizontal strip at screen-bottom: a profoundly moving materialization of spirit.
     There’s a good deal of scientific lecturing about such things as depth perception, molecular activity and energy transformation, and culminating in a whispered reading of the Table of Elements. Yet some of this is mysterious: “What if . . . the far galaxies Man observes make up . . . some enormous creature or cosmic snowflake whose exterior we will never see?” Kaleidoscopic imagery, sometimes embedding crosses or a matrix of net-like squares, suggests the designs of Persian rugs before it resolves into a grand vision of starry cosmos—the conversion into poetry of such an utterance as this: “In Nebraska the landscape seems to go on forever. . . . The chemistry of the plants, soil, water and sky forms an integrated whole that connects Nebraska with every other part of the biosphere.”
     Mirror-imaging gives us trees and sky both above and (upside-down) below land that the camera zips across: life passing by.