The fight for power in an isolated Iranian village. Two families have been enemies for so long they cannot even remember why. The only hope for peace between the feuding families is lost when an arranged marriage agreement is broken. Some days later, the groom, Karamat, returns with a brand new minibus. But a fierce competition for passengers break out when the bride, Mehrbanou, decides to do the same…
Tag: IRAN
Maani Petgar‘s CINEMA CINEMA deals with the controversial and popular Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the making of SALAAM CINEMA. The filmmaker placed an ad in the paper, with the opening words: ‘Wanted: one hundred common people who want to become actors.’ Around five thousand people reacted and fought for a role. In the following eight days, Makhmalbaf filmed thousands of applicants. During the auditions he tried to find out why they would love to act and to which extremes they would go to achieve their aim. In CINEMA CINEMA Petgar shows how the filmmaker works, manipulates and brings about effects, but also how Makhmalbaf himself is manipulated.
No one knows better than Mohsen Makhmalbaf that Iranians are movie mad, so when he placed a casting call for one hundred actors for a new film, he expected a crowd; what he got was a crush—five thousand people. After genially announcing, “You are both the subject and the actors in the film,” he begins auditions. What unfolds is a parade of individuals who, for love of cinema, are by turns brash, crafty, shy, touchingly open, unwittingly hilarious.
Uncle Moustache’s tale shows a developement of an emotional relationship between an old man who has rested heartsick in his solitude for years, and the children who are joyous by nature. The old man lives in a room beside an abandoned site, where children have transformed it into a soccer lot. He is disturbed by children’s commotion. Till one day, children’s ball hits the old man’s window pane and breaks it…
On New Year’s Eve, a young soldier is looking forward to going home but is given orders to escort a juvenile delinquent to a distant reformatory. He sets off with the child handcuffed to him.
The House is Black is an empathetic portrait of a leper colony from Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. Her work, both in film and poetry, has influenced everyone from Iranian New Wave master Abbas Kiarostami to French essay film pioneer Chris Marker. With The House is Black, Farrokhzad unflinchingly captures the world of a leper colony in Tabriz, Iran. She recites her own poetry over images of everyday life for a people shut away from society. Farrokhzad’s portrait highlights a world weighed down by tragedy yet uplifted by community. The result is a heartbreaking film that eschews condescension in favor of hard-won empathy.
A documentary of the epic story of the weaving Chigh. Chigh is a kind of texture made from wood and osier that is made in the ilats of the west of Iran and is used for covering around their Siah-chadors (tents).
A thoughtful and emotionally challenging look at the lives of two children living in modern day Afghanistan, STRAY DOGS lifts the lid on what it is like living in the country, post-Taliban. The film focuses on a young brother and sister who are forced to share their incarcerated mother’s prison cell by night, but roam the streets during the day. For they are homeless; only allowed to stay within the prison’s confines after dark, the children are not permitted there during the day. Fed up with having to fend for themselves, and in a desperate bid to get locked up on a more permanent basis, the siblings concoct a cunning plan; using American cinema as a guide, they begin to perform robberies on the streets of Kabul.