There is considerable value in My Tehran for Sale’s tackling the topic and the milieu that it does. Iran today is so repressive that young Iranians must “go underground” to participate in raves and other forms of youthful expression; the state does not allow such activities. Progressive theater is likewise forbidden. The protagonist of writer-director […]
Tag Archives: Iranian cinema
In film nist is a bracing “attempt” at something. It is “not a film” because it must not be a film. Its principal maker, Jafar Panahi, has been arrested and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and banned from making films or even writing screenplays for 20 years. His crimes? Panahi protested the results of Iran’s […]
In the course of writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Keshtzarhaye Sepid, the boatman Rahmat visits five islands off Lake Urmia in Iran, the third largest saltwater lake on Earth. Each of the islands is composed of salt, which has banished all growing greenery (trees, grass, all other plants) and drained inhabitants of vitality and, perhaps, hope; thus […]
An elliptical parable with something of the force and beauty of Ford and Fernández’s The Fugitive (1947), but with more political punch, Rafi Pitts’s Sanam, from Iran, proceeds at a solemn pace, through deceptively quiet, seemingly half-submerged emotional territory, to a haunting, incendiary finish. It won for Pitts best film prizes at Paris, Vesoul, Valencia, […]
“I like the humour in Kaurismäki, I like the sense of melancholy mixed with humour. If people are in a really messed-up situation, there’s always this lingering hope that something is going to happen any second now. Maybe it never quite does, but the fact that you have that in the back of your head […]
Dennis Grunes 