This highly symbolic Iranian drama (shot in black-and-white) revolves around the most important figure in a remote rural village. That figure is the village’s sole cow, owned by Mashdi Hassan. The beginning of the film makes clear just how vital the cow is to the life of the village and how much Mashdi and his neighbors cherish it. When the cow is threatened and then killed by members of a nearby clan, Mashdi becomes so distraught that he is gradually transformed into a cow himself. One highlight of this film is the glimpse it offers into a style of rural life which has gone unchanged for thousands of years.
Category: Arthouse
Leila is a kind-hearted and loving woman whose marriage to Reza starts off happily. But when she learns that she is infertile, her life changes rapidly. Devastated by the news, Leila finds herself under growing pressure from Reza’s mother to let him take a second wife to bear his children, and what follows is a profound psychological study of a woman swept away on a complex emotional journey. Led by two wonderful performances by Leila Hatami (Leila) and Jamileh Sheikhi as Reza’s manipulative mother, this is a powerful and thought-provoking drama that doesn’t disappoint.
Dariush Mehrjui’s Hamoun is a psychological comedy/drama about a bumbling Iranian intellectual, Hamid Hamoun. Trying and failing to complete a philosophical tract on love, Hamoun cannot seem to convince his wife Mashid, who is a successful artist, to love him either. Hamoun’s refusal to accept reality, or grant Mashid a divorce, is both character study and metaphor for a condition of modern urban life in Iran.
While on a train, a teenage boy thinks about his life and the flamboyant aunt whose friendship acted as an emotional shield from his troubled family. This film evokes the haunting quality of memory while creating a heartfelt portrait of a boy’s life in a rural 1940s Southern town.
A film, like a long poem in which a married couple engage in conversation about love, death, and life while the scenery changes around them. The destiny of each human being plays out between the parallel and antagonistic lines of man and woman, day and night, north and south, black and white. And not knowing what real death will be, we imagine life and death in various ways.
An unemployed man with individualist and pacifist values is inevitably brainwashed by society and the mass media to conform to the dominant ideology and embrace war. His soul is destroyed but his heart cannot be conquered.
A young man recalls his affair with a young French woman who traveled with him across the United States. They began to drift apart during the trip, and eventually each had affairs with other people before realizing that their relationship had run its course.
The film is about the stories of three young people, Marisa, Anna and Enzo, whose situations develop alongside but without any link. Marisa, a modest shop assistant in a haberdasher’s, aims to become a singer: she will soon reach for success, thanks to a contest for new voices. Anna runs away from home to escape the lovely tyranny of her mother, but the life of a modern and free woman is very different from what she had in mind. Enzo, a boy with a head full of dreams frustrated by the misery of the reality that surrounds him, will try to escape the dullness of his existence by setting up a criminal operation.