Notes from the London Kurdish Film Festival 2020

Blogpost, Kurdish Cinema, Uncategorized

Over the past two weeks or so, it has been a huge honour and a great pleasure to act as a member of the jury for the 2020 London Kurdish Film Festival (as well as to do a workshop/’masterclass’ on no-budget filmmaking with them).

I was lucky enough to catch 30 short films during the festival, including the 26 that were in competition for the festival’s main prize and special mentions. Many of these are available online here. (And you can, if you so wish, see my ‘masterclass’ here.)

However, rather than repeat anything from that masterclass, and rather than try to place into a hierarchy of better and worse the 30 films that I saw, I’d like to offer up some general observations about the films.

That is, rather than analyse any one film especially, I’d like to consider the 30 films as a single body in order to say what the LKFF was telling us this year about Kurdish cinema, Kurdish culture more generally, and Kurdistan itself, be that in the sense of a geographic place or as a ‘national’ concept (and I place national in scare quotes to signify/acknowledge the contested status of Kurdistan as a recognised, autonomous country/region, or, if you will, collection of countries – in that Kurdistan spans at least what today are recognised as parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey).

By making some observations and suggestions about what the LKFF films are telling us, we can potentially, if warily, make some extrapolations about what Kurdish cinema is today telling us – in that the concerns and techniques that repeat themselves across numerous of the LKFF films clearly do therefore repeat across Kurdish cinema, even if the films selected for the festival cannot represent the totality of Kurdish cinema.

Naturally, perhaps, I should start by saying that of course the films that I saw demonstrate a diverse and complex set of concerns, with films set in not only Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, but also films about the Kurdish diaspora in, for example, Norway (see Brwa Vahapour’s The Shepherd and Christopher Wollebekk’s My Brother Amal). Various languages are spoken across the films, including several sequences where characters cannot understand each other (especially Return, by Selman Deniz).

What is more, the films received funding from a mixture of sources stretching beyond the five countries mentioned above, and into places like Germany and the UK (although not seemingly beyond the Middle East and Europe).

Finally, the films involved various different styles and genres, ranging of course from fiction and documentary to animation and more.

But beyond these perhaps expected provisos about the vibrant diversity of contemporary Kurdish cinema, I’d like to focus in particular on repeated patterns and tropes across the films.

First of all, I would say that the majority of the films were set in the countryside, meaning that while there may not at present be an internationally recognised country called Kurdistan, the latter does exist as a land, as its very name suggests, in that Kurdistan means ‘land of the Kurds.’

If Kurdistan emerges as precisely a land thanks to the repeated use of landscapes and rural settings, this does stand in some sort of contrast to urban spaces, which do appear in a few of the films from the festival, but in a minority to say the least.

Indeed, those films that do feature cities tend to feature urban spaces as spaces of diaspora, ruin and/or lost memories. For example, Two Ends of a Bridge (Muhammed Seyyid Yıldız) features a man selling Turkish flags on a bridge as a protest seems to erupt in Istanbul, and who walks past a beggar – with the implication being in some respects that the two are Kurds, which is why the flag salesman gives some money to the silent beggar (although not as much money as he might).

Meanwhile, in The Worn Beak of the Crow (Ferhat Özmen), the city is a space that prevents an old woman from (if I am not mistaken) carrying out the traditional practice of burying cheese in the ground in order for it to mature.

Finally, in Last September (Gülsün Odabaş), an old Greek man wanders through the streets and finds his old home, where he hopes to meet his sweetheart from adolescence, and from whom he was separated by the so-called Istanbul Pogrom that took place in September 1955 following the bombing of the house of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

In all three films, then, the city, especially in its contemporary iteration, in some senses gives shape to the isolation of the Kurdish (and in Last September, Greek) characters; that is, unlike the land/countryside, the city does not really function as a home, and even when it does, as in Last September, this ‘home’ is impossible to maintain owing to political events.

Meanwhile, in films like the State we’re in (Savaş Boyraz & Mahkum Abi), There Was a Country (Hebun Polat) and The Heart of Raqqa (Rita Duarte), urban spaces (especially in Syria) have been reduced to rubble, further suggesting that the city is a threatening space for Kurds.

This dichotomy of the city/countryside is worth exploring in a bit more detail, but before we get to that, I’d like to point out that the ‘traditional’ is at times contrasted with the ‘modern’ in ways not just suggested by the rural versus the urban.

In a fashion similar to The Worn Beak…, for example, Trouser (Tahsin Özmen) sees traditional rural clothing being praised for its durability, while modern clothes, including a pair of trousers that various characters share for journeys to the city (where they are not allowed to wear their traditional clothes) wear away after few uses – this despite the fact that the main character, Dilo, is desperate to get to the city.

Furthermore, we see various other Kurdish traditions, customs and practices being threatened by the limitations of the contemporary world in a range of the films, from dancing in A Dance for Death (Zanyar Azizi), weaving in The Pattern (Azad Jannati), making pottery in The Heritage (Baran Reihani), and perhaps even hanging clothes in Are You Listening Mother? (Tuna Kaptan).

The latter, like The Worn Beak… and Last September, features an old woman who basically refuses to follow orders and who as a result creates some chaos in the place where she now lives. Indeed, the trope of the unruly older woman can also be found in Life Gone With the Wind (Siavash Saedpanah) – with each of these examples perhaps signalling that the borders imposed upon and dividing the Kurdish land are arbitrary, especially to a certain generation and gender that does not feel the need to respect the patriarchal practice of creating and fixing national boundaries and privatising space, and even if Kurdistan is a country that has no national boundary since it is not internationally recognised as a nation at all.

Are You Listening… is about a mother who keeps getting into trouble with the law when she sets off her police tag for wandering too far from home – something that she cannot help but do every time she tries to hang up her clothes (in a similar clothing trope to the one explored in Trouser, the mother here seems to be wearing the police tag for having been arrested for knitting an inappropriate sweater for her prisoner nephew). In other words, the film also tells a story where borders are reaffirmed by the official state (here Turkey), while being disruptive and alien for the actual inhabitant.

The arbitrary nature of the border is also highlighted in a film like The Heavy Burden (Yılmaz Özdil), in which we see an old man’s livelihood being decommissioned when his carrier-donkey is deemed too old for service. A young man, Salih, has a replacement donkey – the only catch being that it is back over the border, seemingly in Syria. He goes to collect it, only for the donkey to step on a mine on the way back.

The border itself is represented by a wall – with walls being things that proliferate in urban areas (indeed, the more ‘urban’ a space is, the more walls it has). The border might be represented only by one wall, then, but it nonetheless signifies how borders themselves are part of an ‘urban’ and modern mindset, which can be contrasted with the land, which is open and boundary-less.

What is more, the border is not just represented by a wall, but it is also something that is constructed through media. There are television screens present in a good number of the films (Are You Listening Mother?, The Heavy Burden and For Camera, by Mustafa Shahrokhi, to name but three), but the State we’re in starts in particular with a bravura shot of a distant city that recedes from view as the camera pans (and perhaps tracks) backwards, eventually passing through the screen of a broken television, which then functions itself as a ‘border’ between the city in the distance and the countryside that surrounds it and the camera itself (and by extension us as viewers).

In other words, the films collectively suggest that modern technologies like walls and media alike shape our reality, indeed determining what is ‘real’ (a country like Syria, for example) and what is ‘not real’ (a country like Kurdistan).

However, it is not simply that the countryside and the land alike are a bucolic paradise, even if the status of Kurdistan as, precisely, a land (and not an urban space) would seem to suggest as much.

For while there are beautiful vistas and ethereal lighting in a number of the Kurdish films on offer at the LKFF, the outside is also depicted repeatedly as a dangerous space.

This is represented not just by the landmine in The Heavy Burden, but also by a landmine that kills a young toy-maker called Picasso in Showan (Bijan Zarin). Picasso is, like the lead character Sirvan, reduced to doing illegal smuggling work as a result of the lack of opportunities in the countryside. And while climbing through the mountains with their own ‘heavy burden,’ not only does he succumb to the landmine, but he also is shot at repeatedly by unseen forces monitoring the border space that the smugglers are crossing.

A couple of notes. The first, which hopefully is not too tasteless or wistful: the ‘landmine’ in its very name comes to suggest the way in which common space (the land, or what we might by way of contrast call ‘landours’) is rendered a possession (‘landmine‘) – and the violence that is involved in grabbing land in this way.

The second is that the outside is thus not a happy, peaceful space, but a space that is dangerous, and where numerous characters die – as per The Heavy Burden, Heritage, Return and Akam (Hossein Mirza). And/or it is a space where fights take place, as in Slaughter (Saman Hosseinpuor).

Indeed, as much as there are beautiful landscapes in brilliant light, so do we see exterior spaces that are snowy and unwelcoming. But the impression that one gets is that they have become more unwelcoming as a result of the imposition of borders and the imposition of a modern logic whereby it is increasingly difficult to survive in rural spaces via traditional means.

This seems especially to be the case if one is not to be left behind technologically; people either face suffering and death by staying behind, or they are forced increasingly to shift towards urban spaces, where they are disenfranchised and unhappy. But not only do they go to the urban spaces, be that for better or for worse (in that a character like Dilo in Trouser really wants to go to the city), but the ‘urban’ and ‘modern’ logic of walls and the ‘city’ comes to them in the form of borders and, indeed, weapons like landmines.

This modern logic can also be seen at work in flags, with the main character in Two Ends of a Bridge selling Turkish flags to passersby, while lead character Sami in My Brother Amal is tasked at one point with raising the Norwegian flag, something that he summarily fails to do.

That is, the modern concept of nationalism and, by implication, the nation itself (as defined by the flag) is denied to Kurds and thus comes across as alien to them.

I shall return later to My Brother Amal, but I would like presently to discuss how in contrast to the media being tools for reaffirming national boundaries (and we can think of the flag as exactly a medium for nationalism), this stands in some contrast with art as it features in the films.

For while traditional art forms like dance, as per A Dance for Death, and traditional instruments like the erbane in hush! (Çaxe Nursel Doğan), might well help to define Kurdish culture, the films collectively also suggest that art in fact goes against the modern and ‘urban’ logic of the nation/the national.

This can be seen in a few examples, including via a couple of references to Pablo Picasso. The first is in the afore-mentioned Showan, where the artist-sculptor-toymaker character nicknamed Picasso would seem to represent a creative spirit unnecessarily destroyed by the modern world of media and borders.

The second reference to Picasso is, meanwhile, in the State we’re in, whereby after its opening shot, Picasso’s famous painting Guernica (1937) is used to give expression to the execution of Kurdish activists in the Turkish town of Cizre. It is not that art somehow ‘saves lives’ or some such; however, art does stand as a means to critique state violence and the violence of states, since art itself is stateless and borderless.

A similar lesson might be learnt from I Am Raining Down into the City (Kasım Örderk), in which a poem by the superlative Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad functions to bring peace to the otherwise struggling family that ekes out an existence in a crumbling town.

Finally, The Mandarin Tree (Cengiz Akaygün) features a young girl who draws paintings for her father, who himself is in prison for being an ‘anarchist.’ Even though only a child, the girl’s images of fruit, birds and even of a tree are suspected as themselves being propaganda.

However, after a prison guard nastily destroys one of her images, the girl has the last laugh when she sneaks into the prison some sunflower seeds, that the father then uses to imagine enticing birds to come feed from his hand, and which nest in the tree that she has drawn for her father.

In other words, art here helps to break down prison walls and, by extension, the ‘urban,’ ‘modern’ and ‘nationalistic’ use of walls in general, at least in an imaginary fashion. In this way, art helps the imprisoned father to be out amidst nature’s flora and fauna once again.

And fauna, perhaps especially livestock, are themselves a constant presence in the films, including as major figures in the film’s stories, as per The Heavy Burden and Slaughter. What is more, birds perhaps inevitably signify a kind of desired freedom in the films – although the State we’re in suggests somewhat pessimistically towards its end that the ‘bird of peace’ is dead (a moment to which I shall return below).

While we might think that working relationships with animals signify a kind of ‘primitiveness,’ the constant presence of animals nonetheless bespeaks a borderless existence, in that animals have no knowledge nor care for national boundaries and human squabbles.

In some senses, then, humans would do better to learn from their animals rather than simply to exploit them; that is, to live symbiotically with animals rather than just using them would be part and parcel of a perspective/way of life that is not ‘modern’ or ‘urban,’ and thus detached, but which instead is entangled and respectful.

Indeed, My Cat (Imad Mahmadany) features a young man trying to commit suicide in his spartan bedsit, only for his efforts to be thwarted by a cat that cunningly keeps on making its way indoors and distracting him.

While My Cat presents a potential case of death taking place inside (as opposed to the many deaths that take place outside), the presence of the animal notably prevents it (meaning that even if Kurdistan cannot exist ‘outside,’ it cannot conversely be killed inside)…

This being said, the treatment of animals is not necessarily romantic, just as life in the countryside is not uniquely romanticised, with the outside being a dangerous place, as mentioned.

For, the interior can at times also be a dangerous place, especially for women, as is explored effectively in For Camera, a film that uses documentary techniques to give the viewer the impression that they are seeing a found footage/home movie of domestic abuse.

In this film, notably we see an authoritarian father figure, who is a captain in the police force, abusing his family, especially his wife. The film suggests that Kurdistan has problems ‘inside,’ beyond the problems that Kurdistan faces ‘outside’ (Kurdistan’s issues stem from the Turks, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Iraqis, and so on), and beyond the idea that ‘outside’ is a problem to/for Kurdistan (in that Kurdistan is not recognised internationally as a ‘legitimate’ nation) – as many of the other films in the festival suggest.

Indeed, the domestic spaces that characterise much of For Camera suggest that Kurdistan is not simply a country beset by a dangerous exterior, but that it also has a dangerous interior.

Something similar perhaps happens in hush!, where the girl who wants to play the erbane, Zere, is forbidden from doing so not by, say, an oppressive Turkish system in which traces of Kurdish culture are to be eradicated, but rather by her own grandmother, who feels that music is not an appropriate pastime for her (meaning that this grandmother stands in stark contrast to those unruly older women in the other films mentioned above).

What is more, the Kurdish films collectively suggest that we live a world not only where wars can leave people crippled, but where disability can affect anyone. From deafness in Akam, to memory loss in Last September, to lost limbs in Testament (Kamiran Betasi), to Down syndrome in Slaughter, to lameness in The Summer of the Swans (Maryam Samadi), there is a sense here that Kurdish existence is in some senses always dis-abled, in that it is barred from leading a ‘regular’ and ‘modern’ life…

As not all of the films depict problems only bombarding Kurds from the outside (see For Camera), so do not all of the films depict plucky Kurds overcoming dangerous odds. Not only are many of the films pessimistic (a point to which I shall also return below), but they can also critique Kurdish existence.

It is notable, however, that the main film that does this, namely For Camera, carries such a self-conscious title.

For, not only does this title complicate the ‘documentary’ ‘truth’ of what we are seeing, but it also suggests indeed that the nation as a concept is tied to images (all nations really exist for the camera). Furthermore, since Kurdistan is a land without a nation (or a nation without a state), so is it in some ways a nation without an image (something akin to what I have argued elsewhere in relation to Afghan cinema). Or rather, For Camera does not try to create a positive and propagandistic image of the nation (a national image that is posed for the camera, much as we check our hair and put on our best smiles when we are asked to say cheese), but rather it seeks to deconstruct the constructed nature of all images, including perhaps the ones that we see in this film itself.

I might briefly add that this deconstruction is achieved remarkably through the use of handheld digital cameras, with the cinematography and the editing of the film being far more ‘choppy’ than perhaps the majority of other movies, which are much more ‘slow’ and ‘cinematic’ in the perceived ‘richness’ and ‘beauty’ of their images.

In other words, For Camera in many ways is a kind of anti-image of Kurdistan, but in becoming as much, it also becomes anti-images in general (in the sense that it makes us wary not just of the images that we are seeing, but wary of the constructed nature of all images, and perhaps of all national images in particular). This in turn suggests perhaps that Kurdistan (the ‘real’ Kurdistan?) exists beyond images – and beyond the nation (again, Kurdistan really exists inside and not outside; it cannot, if you will, be seen, but can only be felt).

This critique of images we might compare to My Brother Amal, which notably is a film made by a Norwegian director. I am not sure of the filmmaker’s connection to or knowledge of Kurdistan; but in being a relatively generic, if well-made, tale of a boy haunted by the ghost of his dead brother, who seems in the young Sami’s paranoid fantasies to hate Sami for coming close to assimilating to Norwegian life, the film rang oddly false.

While many refugees may lament not being in and with the land of their home, for Sami to be safe would surely be of greater importance than his not being at home (he cannot ‘betray’ Kurdistan by leaving, since this is only the ‘outside’ of the nation, and thus simply an image; he could only betray Kurdistan inwardly, but his very memories of his brother mean that this cannot happen – in that he will always remember his brother).

Put differently, we might critique the film by asking from a pragmatic level who would not wish their own brother happiness, even if in a new land?

And yet, as mentioned, Amal’s criticism of Sami (Amal’s seeming desire for Sami not to be happy) is the latter’s paranoid fantasy; Amal is not really there and it is Sami who is worried that if he makes an effort to fit into Norwegian life then he is the one betraying his roots. But while this is comprehensible, it perhaps is not sufficiently signalled that this is not really Amal, and so it just seems as though the film is an exercise in using the tropes of horror to ‘spice up’ a film that would surely be interesting enough when dealing with a young refugee not on cinematic terms (using stylistic tropes from horror), but on a more, can I say?, realistic level.

That is, My Brother Amal posits the inner life of Sami as precisely cinematic/an image, as an exterior/an outside, when our inner lives are in fact ‘beyond’ images – something that makes the film differ sharply from the other movies made closer to the Kurdish region.

But this is perhaps a minor quibble, and across all of the films a love of cinema as much as for Kurdistan and Kurdish culture is what is apparent. Indeed, I enjoyed how there are heart graffiti painted on walls in various films – a minor detail and likely a coincidence, but something that semi-consistently seems to connote love as part of the ‘Kurdish’ mise-en-scène (furthermore, various films also feature toy soldiers, as if to suggest that there is an inherent childishness to contemporary violence?).

In the use of landscapes and in their pacing, many films reminded me of the work of Abbas Kiarostami, while in the handheld films, and in the landmine and mountain movies (especially involving smuggling), as well as in various films’ use of music, including the erbane/daf in hush!, the influence of perhaps the most famous Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi, seemed also to be felt.

While Sami finds a bird that then dies in My Brother Amal, while the bird of peace is dead in the State we’re in, and while a deer dies that a man tries to rescue in The Shepherd (among many other downbeat endings – as mentioned above), films like The Mandarin Tree, hush!, Last September and Life Gone With the Wind all suggest that hope may yet be found for Kurdistan.

Certainly, based on the breadth, quality and intelligence of the films screened at this year’s London Kurdish Film Festival, which themselves reflect the vibrant nature of contemporary Kurdish culture, there is much about which to feel hopeful and positive.

Furthermore, while a film like The Heart of Raqqa not only gives to us another heart in its title, akin to those hearts featured on the wall graffiti of ruined houses, it also in its celebration of Mehmet Aksoy, a journalist who lost his life in the service of reporting on the work of Kurdish forces against ISIS, inspires viewers to think about the role that cinema can play in helping to change the world – and hopefully for the better.

With the example of Aksoy in mind, may many more Kurdish cinematic flowers bloom.

*** Many thanks to festival organiser Kaveh Abbasian both his invitation to take part in the LKFF 2020, and for his help in clarifying a couple of plot points around some of the above films.

The comedy of experimental cinema

American cinema, Blogpost, Canadian cinema, Experimental Cinema, Film reviews, Uncategorized

I can only say what I saw and heard (and felt and thought).

Over the last two evenings, I have attended two experimental film events. The first was a screening of Michael Snow’s La région centrale (Canada, 1971) at the Serpentine Gallery, which screened alongside the opening credits of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958) – with both being chosen by artist Lucy Raven, whose solo exhibition, Edge of Tomorrow, is currently on there. The second was a performance at Tate Modern of Tony Conrad’s 55 Years on the Infinite Plain (originally called 10 Years on the Infinite Plain when first performed in New York, USA, in 1972, and which has been growing in age ever since – now beyond Conrad’s death last year).

For those unfamiliar with either of these works, the former is a three-hour film shot on the top of a mountain in Québec, and which features images captured remotely by Snow using a robotic arm, to which Snow’s camera was attached, and which rotates in a long series of different directions. The latter is a 90-minute piece featuring ‘drone’ music and black and white strips that flicker on a screen from four projectors simultaneously.

Both experiences involve a fair amount of discomfort, not least because traditional cinema seats were not provided, with the viewer instead having to sit on a wooden stand (La région centrale) or on the floor (55 Years…). Standing is an option. But either way, one really feels the presence of one’s body as one tries to find comfort during the screenings (and live musical performance in the case of 55 Years…).

I am not an expert on experimental cinema. I have seen a fair amount, read a fair amount of literature about it, and also think about it (and occasionally write about experimental aspects of cinema that is otherwise not so overtly non-narrative as these two films).

I am driven to write about these back-to-back experiences, though, not simply to expose my ignorance of the subject (I can’t imagine that I shall say much that others have not written – or certainly thought – in relation to these films), but to convey some thoughts that I had while watching the films. Perhaps that is, after all, one of the things that a blog can do.

To get to my thoughts, though, we must describe what happens in the films. As I have already hinted, ‘not much happens’ from the perspective of someone looking for a film that tells a story. La région centrale features images captured by the camera as it moves round and round, back and forth, spinning upside down, moving in circles in all sorts of directions and more.

55 Years…, meanwhile, features a deep electric bass line (performed on this occasion by Dominic Lash), accompanied by violin (Angharad Davies) and long string drone (Rhys Chatham). At first one projector, then two, then three, then four fill the wide screen with the flickering lines, before all four projectors slowly begin to converge, their images overlapping, and then are turned off one by one, until only one flickering image remains.

Probably sounds pointless, maybe even dull, right – especially if one lasts 180 minutes and the other 90?

I do not think so. Indeed, quite the opposite.

The Snow experience induced in me so many different thoughts, which perhaps have at their core a sense of seeing the Earth as if through the eyes of an alien. Initially surveying the ground, the camera then begins to rotate in such ways that we are consistently being given new perspectives on our world – toying with it, twisting it, turning it, experimenting with it.

As María Palacios Cruz explained in her introduction, Snow deliberately tried to find a spot in his native Canada where no visible trace of human life could be seen (something that might recall my earlier post about the ‘American eye’ in relation to Le corbeau). In other words, he absolutely wants us to see the world from an inhuman perspective; to see the world ‘for itself.’

In the process, we begin to understand how as humans we often do not see the world ‘for itself’ but how it is ‘for us’ (and this is not necessarily a bad thing; we are driven to live and survive by our selfish genes, after all). By getting us to see the world ‘for itself,’ the world itself is made ‘alien’ to us, or we see the world as if through alien eyes. The film becomes a panoply of different ways to look at the world through the insistent movement of the camera – with the non-stop nature of that camera movement also bringing to mind the way in which our relatively static perspective of the world is perhaps key in bringing about our inability to see the world ‘for itself.’

For, the world is also movement – but generally we do not have eyes to see it. The rhythms of the world are perhaps too slow for us to detect. What Snow’s film does, then, is to bring to mind those rhythms. Not just Snow’s film, but by extension cinema as a whole is thus in part a machine to present to us something like ‘deep time’ – the long, slow rhythms of the world that extend further back than we can remember and further into the future than we can imagine (in other words, a world without humans). Perhaps this is why a narrative classic like Vertigo is also chosen to play in part alongside Snow’s film.

If Snow’s film takes us into the realm of planetary time, Conrad’s film takes us (or me, at least) into the realm of universal time.

Using black and whites strips alone, Conrad takes us into a realm whereby I am confronted not just with a world that exists far beyond the human realm, but with the way in which the world – the universe itself – comes into and out of being. If the world pre-existed humans by billions of years, and if it will outlive humans by billions of years (La région centrale), then Conrad’s film tells us that the universe pre-existed the world by trillions of years, and will continue to exist after the world has gone by trillions of years. (It exists beyond time itself, and beyond measure. Again, language becomes meaningless.)

More than this… 55 Years on the Infinite Plain tells us – in its flickering of white, or being, and black, or nothing – that existence itself comes into and out of being. That there is a beyond existence; that there is a beyond being; that there is a beyond ‘is’ – such that one cannot even express what we are describing since to say that ‘there is a beyond “is”‘ is clearly a contradiction in terms (how can not-is and is co-exist?)!

If language cannot suffice for the task of explaining what we see, then we enter into the realm of experience and of a new, different kind of thought (that also cannot be defined simply by what we ‘see,’ since it must be experienced, too).

What is the universe? But simply a flicker of light in an otherwise infinite blackness.

If 55 Years… takes us somehow beyond the universe, then it takes us into a realm not of a singular reality (a uni-verse), but into the realm of multiple realities. An alien perspective, or what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and physicist Aurélien Barrau might suggest is the necessary understanding that there is no world, but only multiple, infinite worlds.

As per the translation of their book on the matter: what is these worlds coming to? What these worlds is coming to (note the grammatical error; again, language does not quite suffice) is the co-existence of existence and non-existence. To invoke a different philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, being and nothingness at the same time.

Am I being pretentious? Possibly. I mean, people walked out of both screenings – and so clearly not everyone goes with these films. But at the end of 55 Years… the remaining audience members (perhaps as many as 100 people) sat in silence and darkness for about a minute. Finally, some applause – enthusiastic applause, some whoops of joy. Clearly they needed a moment to catch their thoughts, because this film had taken them somewhere different, somewhere special.

In other words, if to someone who was not there this all sounds like wank, to the majority of people who were there, this meant something – even if expressing it is and perhaps remains difficult. “That was absolutely fucking amazing,” said the woman sat next to me. I felt like dancing (and did nearly throughout 55 Years… – although I refrained from doing so).

Elsewhere I have written about how Hollywood presents to us narrative films that, even if they contain ‘puzzles’ for us to work out (my example is Inception, Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010), they are still designed to be easy to consume and, by extension, not particularly challenging. I then suggest that films that do not involve narratives (my example is Five Dedicated to Ozu, Iran/Japan/France, 2003, by the late Abbas Kiarostami) can be quite challenging, even if there is no specific puzzle to work out – as we just see images of waves lapping the shore, or ducks walking along a beach, or a pond at night.

My argument in that essay is that common responses to Five… might include either ‘I got it after two minutes, so I do not know why I had to sit through that’ or ‘I did not get it’ – while people might easily say that they ‘got’ Inception (even though it is more than twice the length of Five…).

I suggest that there is not so much anything to ‘get’ with Five… (or Inception, or Vertigo – as its inclusion by Lucy Raven in her programme makes clear), but that one might ‘get into’ that sort of film by working at being an attentive audience member and beginning to marvel at what a wave lapping against the shore is and might mean (is it not a miracle that this happens?) as opposed only to marvelling at special effects and ‘mind-bending ideas’ (even though the leaders of the two largest energy companies in the world sit next to each other on an aeroplane and do not recognise each other).

(Besides which, whenever one says that one ‘got’ such a film after two minutes, they clearly do not ‘get’ it since part of getting it must involve experiencing the film in its entire duration, including the sense of slowness, and the different time or tempo of the piece. To demand that it be shorter is not to respect this otherness, but to apply one’s own rhythm to it, to curtail it, perhaps even to kill it.)

(Speaking of marvelling, I also found myself marvelling during 55 Years… about the fact that I can rotate my head. How is it possible that a human evolved from the mud of a planet that itself was a rock spewed from a star, such that it has a head that can rotate on a joint that sits atop a backbone and which contains eyes that can see and ears that can hear?)

To return from these loco parentheses: I make reference to my own essay not simply to continue to explain to a(n imagined?) ‘viewer-on-the-street’ that these non-narrative films might do something for us (and that thus people who might otherwise never go to watch such films might do worse than to give them a try), but also to correct what I wrote in that essay.

In that essay, I wrote that we might ‘get into’ films like Five Dedicated to Ozu by putting in some effort ourselves (rather than having nigh everything served up to us on a plate, as per Inception). However, now I think it would be better to suggest that we do not ‘get into’ but that we ‘get with’ such films (which is not necessarily to the exclusion of ‘getting with’ mainstream films; I believe that we can get with cinema as a whole – but don’t think that we should only get with the mainstream at the expense of the weird and the wonderful).

Why do I now want to say that we should ‘get with’ as opposed to ‘get into’ these films?

Well, in part this is to explain that getting a bit ‘pretentious’ (talking about cosmic things like a world without humans and a multiverse that exists and does not) is to get with what these films are doing, or at the very least what these films can do with us (it might also be an act of love if we were to say that we ‘go with’ these films – since coitus itself means to go with [co-itus] – as I have suggested here).

Furthermore, the preposition ‘with’ (a favourite of Jean-Luc Nancy) suggests not quite a disconnection from the world (seeing it through alien eyes), but also a connection with the world (seeing it ‘for itself’ – or from the perspective of a world that has seen so much more than humans and a multiverse that has seen so much more than our world).

Seeing through the eyes of the other, a kind of forgetting oneself, is also to commune with another – and in this case not just another human, but a whole other timescale (the entirety of existence) and space scale (a planet, a universe – as well, in the case of La région centrale when it shows us the land beneath the camera in close up, a rock, a patch of earth, a blade of grass). ‘With’ is to go beyond the self, to open the self up not only to the other human, but in the cases of La région centrale and 55 Years on the Infinite Plain, the inhuman.

Furthermore, ‘with’ always implies plurality, or a multiplicity of things and perspectives. For, one cannot be with anything or anyone if there is no thing or one beyond the self with which to be. With, therefore, suggests that we live in a multiverse, and that what these worlds is coming to is perhaps us, our understanding of the multiverse, and our place with it.

(The Conrad also suggests with in other ways – particularly the way in which my eyes when they move from left to right can make the flickers seem as though moving in that direction – before then moving in the other direction as my eyes move from right to left… That is, I am with the film in the sense that I co-create what I see; I see not just a different perspective, but a different perspective with my own eyes; I am entangled with the multiverse. This might seem to contradict the idea that I get beyond myself – but what perhaps really is exposed is not just the world beyond the self, but also the relationship between that world beyond self, and the self itself. What is exposed or revealed is our withness – and how the otherness of that with which we are is necessary for me even to exist and to have my sense of self/my perspective in the first place.)

I wish to end, then, by suggesting that these films do not just put us with the universe or multiverse. They put us with the medium of cinema, too, which opens us up to these new perspectives. I hear the 16mm projector rattle along during La région centrale, and I turn to see the projectors during 55 Years…. The experience of these two films is, then, to be with media, to be co-media, to be comedy.

What we can experience during these films is thus the comedy of the multiverse. When we find such films frustrating, we are perhaps taking them far too seriously (I personally found myself laughing regularly during both films as I marvelled at the possibility of anything existing at all). When we are serious, it is because we are rigid in our ways, in our thinking, and we are resistant to change. We do not become, we are not coming to, we are not with (perhaps we are solipsistically dreaming, a state of unconsciousness from which we can recover only by ‘coming to’).

To be less serious, to enjoy the comedy: this is not only a route to laughter and thus by extension happiness – it is perhaps also a route via with to wisdom (to be ‘other-wise’).

Long live experimental cinema. When screenings like these come along, I can only recommend one thing: get with it.

Notes from the LFF: Pardé/Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi, Iran, 2013)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Iranian cinema, London Film Festival 2013

A man (Kambuzia Partovi) arrives at a house with a holdall. He locks the door, closes the curtains, blacks out his windows and then pulls out of the holdall a dog. We discover that he is a writer and from the television that owning dogs is illegal – and that many dogs are being executed when found.

A knock on the door, a couple enters who claim to be fleeing the police. The man (Hadi Saeedi) leaves, the woman (Maryam Moqadam) seems to come and go – as if materialising and dematerialising within the house at different times.

The house is raided, the writer and his dog hide. Then, as the writer leaves frame during one shot, Jafar Panahi walks into frame – and begins to fix up his house, the window to which has been smashed.

The woman and the writer discuss the fact that Panahi is forgetting them – and that they must make themselves enter his thoughts in order to remain alive.

A second woman (Azadeh Torabi) comes looking for her sister, Melika, who is the woman who arrived during the night and who is talking to the writer. Panahi, however, tells the second woman that he has not seen Melika, nor her brother, the man who came with her.

Workers come and go – and we get the impression that we cannot tell who is imagined and who is real in this movie that seems to be a defiant treatise on the creative process.

Jafar Panahi’s second movie made since his ban on filmmaking for 20 years (after In Film Nist/This is Not a Film, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran, 2011), Closed Curtain similarly revels in interiors that are in fact an ‘externalisation’ of the imagination, and fictional characters that are the contents of Panahi’s head.

As the film progresses and as the seeming-fictional characters inside Panahi’s head decide that they do not wish to be forgotten, or die, as a result of Panahi not remembering them, we get the sense that filmmaking is almost an ethical duty.

That is, these people that the filmmaker – which we can expand anyone creative – has in head (and if we don’t like the idea of ‘people’ living ‘inside our head’, then we can simply call them ‘ideas’) have a life – and one owes it to them, as if they were real, to keep them alive. For, the life of the mind is as important as the physical realm in which our flesh circulates.

Indeed, Panahi’s film makes it clear that we cannot tell these apart: if Melika were simply imagined, why would her sister talk to Panahi? And if the writer were merely imagined, then why would he get into Panahi’s car at the film’s end and drive off with him with his dog (leaving Melika, sadly, in the house)?

Panahi contemplates suicide in the film – walking into the ocean and never coming back (shades of Darbereye Elly/About Elly, Asghar Farhadi, Iran/France, 2009). We see this happening, but then Panahi is back in the house. In a film, what is imagined and what is real are inseparable – and the power of film is to make us question precisely what is real, to encourage us to think.

And even though the Panahi character laments the fact that he cannot be as creative as he wants, ultimately, he must be defiant and carry on creating, since the life of the mind, those ideas that live in our mind, are as much us as our bodies – and we must realise these ideas by making films (the French verb for directing a film is réaliser).

The liminal setting of the seaside is important here: the ocean is our unconscious, with its unseen depths. And as much as Panahi (and Melika in her own way) are lured by the ocean towards death, one also gets the sense that all characters that we see, perhaps we ourselves, have come from the depths of the ocean, the unconscious, where ideas turn and flow in unseen fashion.

Images within images: Panahi filming on his iPhone, a camera crew walking into a shot – replaying a moment earlier when the writer lets in Melika and her brother. As Chuang Tzu says:

Once I, Chuang Tzu, dreamed I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself, but I did not know that I was Tzu. Suddenly I awoke, and there was I, visibly Tzu. I do not know whether it was Tzu dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he was Tzu. Between Tzu and the butterfly there must be some distinction. [But one may be the other.] This is called the transformation of things.

What is dream? What is reality? The time of the body and the time of the mind become indistinguishable. As, arguably, do Panahi’s films and those of his contemporaries.

I am thinking about oblique references in Closed Curtain to the work of Abbas Kiarostami, who recently has become a migrant filmmaker working in Italy and Japan.

In particular, Closed Curtain seems to speak to Five Dedicated to Ozu (Iran/Japan/France, 2003), a lyrical contemplation of the sea – driftwood on the waves, ducks walking along the beach, humans meeting by the seaside, with a brief lightning flash reminiscent of ABC Africa (Iran, 2001).

I do not think Panahi is offering an implicit critique of Kiarostami here, though potentially he could be. More, I get the impression that movies are memories, even those of/by other people, and that they constitute who we are. As is said in the film, in the end, life is memories.

Lyrical, melancholy but, as mentioned, ultimately defiant, Closed Curtain is another fascinating work by one of contemporary cinema’s finest filmmakers.

Notes from the LFF: Mourning (Morteza Farshbaf, Iran, 2011)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Iranian cinema, Uncategorized

Mourning is one of the three Iranian films playing at this year’s London Film Festival – and I will be blogging about all three once I have had a chance to see them.

Mourning tells the story of Arshia (Amir Hossein Maleki), a young boy whose parents abandon him one night after a row.

The next thing we see is a car traveling through the Iranian countryside, a nice black 4×4 drifting along dirt tracks and surrounded by lush grass dancing in the wind.

Subtitles appear as if in error on the bottom of the screen – we can hear no spoken words. But after some time we realise that this is the conversation taking place in the car in sign language between Kamran (Kiomars Giti) and Sharareh (Sharareh Pasha), two middle-aged deaf and dumb people who have taken Arshia into their care after his parents’ departure.

En route, Kamran and Sharareh come across a car crash in a tunnel. Kamran leaves his vehicle and goes to investigate. It soon transpires that Arshia’s parents have seemingly died in this car crash, meaning that Kamran and Sharareh will have to look after Arshia from now on.

Mourning is not quite a real time movie, but all of its action takes place over a night and a day, as Arshia, Sharareh and Kamran try to come to terms with the death of the former’s parents, and to envisage a future for the young boy that has been left behind.

The car seems to be a staple motif – and setting – for various Iranian films, with Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, France/Iran/USA, 2002), 10 on Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, France/Iran, 2004) and the more recent The Hunter (Rafi Pitts, Iran/Germany, 2010) emerging as prominent examples. Given that director Farshbaf is a Kiarostami protégé, this perhaps comes as no surprise.

The car suggests a simple paradox: it enables mobility while at the same time being an enclosed space. What is more, the use of tunnels along the way in this movie, and in The Hunter also, suggests further layers of enclosure – and darkness.

Given the prominence of these visual motifs – the car and the tunnel – it becomes hard not to read Mourning allegorically.

That is, the film does play as an affecting character piece in which Arshia, who seemingly can both lip read and sign, must learn in a brutal fashion about the death of his parents (which we never see), and in which Kamran and Sharareh run through a range of responses to the death of the child’s parents, from the pragmatic (they are the best placed people to look after Arshia) to the darkly comic (Kamran complaining about how Arshia needs the loo every few minutes).

But the film nonetheless – perhaps in a ‘bad’ way given Fredric Jameson‘s belief that Westerners cannot help but read ‘Third World’ literature, and by extension films, as national allegories – seems to be less about the characters whose lives briefly we share, and more about the place in which the story takes place.

Given the overwhelming silence of the film, the allegory is far from over-stated. And yet the abandonment of a child, his adoption by kind, mobile, but ultimately confined-to-the-car ersatz parents, whose voices literally cannot be heard, and whose language is alien to all but the happiest few, seems strongly to suggest an Iran whose youth has also been abandoned by rowing parents who will drive each other to death, and whose institutional support is minimal.

This reading is without question simplistic – as well as arguably problematic given the perennial issue of for whom this film was made and to whom it will most likely appeal (your average Iranian Joe, or well-to-do Westerners who have time to worry about a land so foreign to them as Iran). That is, in (over-)determining Mourning as a ‘message’ film, I have almost certainly overlooked its power to affect viewers in diverse ways, some abstract (such are allegories) and some physical.

But to stick to the allegorical, the film ends with Arshia in a tunnel. We see a protracted shot of the tunnel – a gaping black hole in the middle of the screen, the impenetrability of which suggests an uncertain future. And then we see a reverse shot: daylight at the end of the tunnel, but with darkness all around us. The light seems ever-so-close, but we do not approach.

Having also had the chance recently to see The Green Wave (Ali Samadi Ahadi, Germany, 2010), a guerrilla film involving tweets, amateur footage, voice recordings, talking heads interviews and animated versions of blogs concerning the Green Movement, Mourning becomes even more resonant.

The Green Wave documents the repressive violence that surrounded the wave of protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s seemingly fraudulent re-election to office in the 2009 Iranian presidential elections.

There have since been arrests, murders and brutality aplenty – condoned if not directly authorised by the government.

And what is being protested is not just a stolen election but the deprivation of the right to a democratic society based upon choice.

Iran is a country with a huge youth population – not least in part as a result of the Iran-Iraq war that ran from 1980 to 1988, and which resulted in 500,000 to 1,000,000 deaths. In other words, with the adult generation of the 1980s depleted and scarred by war, it is those who have grown up since who now are the driving force, or the main constituent part, of the Green Movement.

As such, Arshia seems to stand for all Iranian youth – stuck in a tunnel, having lost his parents to internecine disputes, and with new, surrogate parents who do not necessarily speak his language – however benign-willed they are or wish to be.

Given the difficulty with which filmmakers can make films in contemporary Iran (and given the arrest of some 25 filmmakers recently in Iran), it seems that allegory is the only means through which filmmakers can make any political points – even if the use of allegory risks confusing that message (if the message could be anything but confused if it were to pay respect to the complexities of the world and perhaps of Iran in particular).

As such, my take on Mourning as being allegorical is reinforced, since films like The Green Wave cannot be made in Iran, as that film’s German production location makes clear. Farshbaf must be political – like Kiarostami his master – by avoiding the overtly political.

Once again, this is not to overlook the film’s poetic nature: beautiful landscapes filled with human and humane people who live and love like anywhere else on Earth. But politics and poetics do not have to be mutually exclusive; indeed, the film’s patiently long takes – especially of Iran’s luscious green grass – lend to Mourning not the howl that The Green Wave evokes, but a calm, reasoned, certain appeal to a better future…

The Hunter (Rafi Pitts, Iran/Germany, 2010)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Iranian cinema

The Hunter is about Ali (Rafi Pitts), a former convict-turned-factory worker who tries to support his wife and child. Ali returns home one day to discover that his wife and daughter have gone missing. After hours at the police station, he discovers that his wife has been killed during a demonstration – and that his daughter is still missing. When the daughter is also discovered to be dead, Ali goes on a rampage, killing two police officers before being hunted down in a wood north of Tehran.

The Hunter sounds like a thriller, and in many ways it is one, but the film is also very slow paced in comparison to your average thriller from Hollywood, such as the recent Unstoppable (Tony Scott, USA, 2010). For example, the film is filled with prolonged scenes of Ali driving, particularly in and through tunnels, as he wanders around Tehran in his pastel green sedan. The film features a car chase, as Ali tries to elude a police car along mist-covered and winding hill roads. This scene is surprisingly effective, because, unlike Unstoppable with the numerous close ups of its star vehicle runaway train and its rapid cutting, the chase in The Hunter is filmed mainly in long shot and with takes that last a good few seconds.

In other words, if The Hunter is a thriller, its slow pace makes it a very unusual one, while the painterly composition of the film’s images, which director Pitts retains from It’s Winter (Iran/France, 2006) similarly draws our attention away from simply the action. While beautiful from start to finish, this painterly quality of The Hunter suggests that it wants us to understand not just what happens in the film, but why it has been filmed in the way that it has. Indeed, how the police manage so easily to track down Ali after his crime is never explained; they just seem to find him immediately, and the film does not seem to care especially for showing us how this came to be.

As a result, The Hunter seems to ask us to think about its formal properties, or how it is put together, and here the colour of the film comes to the fore. Ali’s sedan is the most striking example, but the colour green features prominently throughout the film. Green is an important colour in Iran, because the so-called Green Movement has since 2009 used green to symbolise its struggle against the fraudulent election result that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regain power. to read some background from WikiLeaks, read here.

In this way, the slowness of the film becomes not a fault but a symbol of the difficulty to move freely in contemporary Iran, as reinforced by the tunnel sequences. The police’s immediate discovery of Ali also suggests a repressive state surveillance system, while the death of Ali’s wife and daughter might reflect indirectly upon the social incarceration of women under the present Iranian regime (thereby perhaps making a link between this film and Zamani Esmati’s Orion (Iran, 2010), which refers to Orion as a hunter constellation in its critique of a phsyicist’s irresponsible treatment of its main character, Elham, played by Nasim Kiani).

As a result of its pace, The Hunter is a film that many might dismiss as dull and slow. However, these supposedly ‘negative’ elements of the film really reveal the call for freedom in Iran – and in a way that is seemingly novel for Iranian cinema.

For, by giving us a thriller/non-thriller, Pitts’ film marks a shift towards at least some acknowledgement of mainstream film audiences as a potential target for his political/artistic ambitions (even if distribution companies subsequently crush this by marketing the film in ways that do not reflect what or how the film is).

It is not that Iran does not have a mainstream cinema. However, rarely does this mainstream cinema from Iran receive large audiences in the West (except, perhaps, in Los Angeles and other areas with large diasporic Iranian communities). It is generally ignored by the commercial cinemas and not given much of a chance in film festivals. In part, this prejudice against Iranian mainstream cinema is propagated by Iranian scholars in the West, particularly Hamid Dabashi, who rarely has a good word to say about it. And in part this prejudice is also unjustified.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, for example, is widely feted (not least by Dabashi) as one of Iran’s greatest art house filmmakers. However, his early film Baykot/Boycott (Iran, 1985), which Dabashi does mark as being Makhamalbaf’s first ‘mature’ film (and he says that the films prior to this one can go into the trashcan), is most certainly a political action film, with shootouts and chases galore. In comparison to his better known Nun va Goldoon/A Moment of Innocence (Iran/France, 1996), Gabbeh (Iran/France, 1996), and Safar e Ghandehar/Kandahar (Iran/France, 2001), Boycott is rarely discussed. It is as if this more commercial film somehow did not count (and as if many people had drawn the line in a slightly different place from Dabashi and consigned this one to the trashcan, too).

Furthermore, I have been trying to publish work for some time now on Tahmineh Milani, exploring her work as a similar example of a woman who makes mainstream and popular films that are not only not bad, but in fact are good and, regardless of their ‘quality,’ are certainly worthy of scholarly attention (my would-be article, which is supposed at some point to come out in this journal, or one of its affiliates, is about Milani’s film Atash bas/Cease Fire (Iran, 2006) a comedy about divorce that was the highest grossing film in Iran of all time).

Somewhat akin to Darbareye Elly/About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, Iran, 2009), which is currently showing as part of the first London Iranian Film Festival, which I saw last year in Paris, and which is also something of a thriller about a child who goes missing, The Hunter seems to want actively to move towards these mainstream and ‘genre’ films – and not away from them as has seemingly been the trend for some time in the areas of Iranian cinema that are most successful internationally, that is, its art house or ‘festival’ films (made by the likes of Makhamalbaf and his family, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and so on).

Again, not that The Hunter, About Elly, or, for that matter, Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh/No One Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi, Iran, 2009), which in its use of a hip hop and indy soundtrack at least makes moves towards a more ‘commercial’ and MTV-influenced aesthetic, are fully commercial films, but they are signalling a shift towards more commercially-minded endeavours.

What might the reasoning be behind this? Well, firstly, since Makhmalbaf and family have fled to Afghanistan, and since Kiarostami has fled to Europe, and since Panahi was placed under house arrest by the Iranian government, perhaps filmmakers need now to occult even more their opposition to the powers that be. And while some, Ghobadi and Esmati included, have gone ‘underground’ to make their films, others – in a manner somewhat akin to André Breton, who in his Second Surrealist Manifesto suggested that surrealism also needed to hide in more commercial ventures if it was to retain its political power – have moved closer to the mainstream, because there is no point only making festival films that reach a small, if willing, audience that is already ready to hear what the film has to say (via its mise-en-scene, as seems the case in The Hunter).

If film is to be part of the effort to bring about change in Iran, against whose repressive regime The Hunter seems indirectly to be something of a call to arms, perhaps appealing not just to the international cinerati of the festival circuit, but (can I speculate?) a hopefully wider audience at home, is the most likely way of making this happen.

There is a scene in The Hunter where Ali drives on to the hillside outside of Tehran, perhaps to the very same spot that Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) goes to die in Ta’m e guilass/Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 1997), the film that won its director the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and arguably which launched or cemented the trend for Iranian ‘festival’ films around the world.

Not so much a critique per se of Kiarostami, whose Certified Copy (France/Italy/Iran, 2010) feels like something of a ‘cop out’ as the director decides not to engage with Iran in order to make wordy films about high art (can we really blame Kiarostami, though?), the moment in The Hunter, which bears a striking resemblance to the setting in Taste of Cherry, does seem to link this film to that film’s sense of hopelessness and the feeling of oppression (no one knows why Badii wants to die, or if they do, I can’t remember), but, given the violence of The Hunter, Badii’s resignation is implicitly criticised in the face of Ali’s desire to take up (maniacal) arms.

The Hunter, then, may yet signal/be part of a new evolution in Iranian cinema, the ‘mainstream’-seeming but deeply political cinema that accompanies the ‘underground’ movement signalled by Ghobadi and Esmati. In comparison, Kiarostami’s Certified Copy does seem somewhat irrelevant, a generic art house film in one of the worst senses of the word, but this is not to rule Kiarostami out, since who knows where he will go next, and we could argue that the mythical epic that his female audience watches in Shirin (Iran, 2008) also signals the increasing need for a mainstream presence in Iran’s art house cinema/the need for Iran’s art house cinema to hide itself a bit more in ‘mainstream’-seeming/’generic’ films. As Iran’s cinema evolves, however (with Kiarostami’s move to Europe perhaps a very important personal evolution, even if it is somewhat lost on me), we are certainly witnessing a cinema that has life in its bones yet. For all of the problems that Ahmadinejad’s Iran seems to impose on its citizens, and for the damnation that faces me for saying it, perversely this makes for exciting and dynamic times in Iranian cinema (cue Graham Greene and Orson Welles on Italy, the Borgias, art, Switzerland, and the cuckoo clock).