#FIFF35

[festivalists]

Through the olive trees

This is not the first time we turn our gaze to the cinema of Iran, yet it is the first time we actually had our own envoy in Tehran – we give you the 35th edition of Fajr International Film Festival as seen and instagrammed by Irina Trocan!

Starting with Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOME? / KHANE-YE DOUST KODJAST? (1987) and leading up to Asghar Farhadi’s THE SALESMAN / FORUSHANDE (2016), Iranian cinema has enjoyed great visibility abroad. Since there are strong similarities between many of these films, it even comes across as a unitary style, a national school, with Kiarostami as a mentor and Jafar Panahi as one of the most prominent representatives working today. These films are dramaturgically subtle (and supple), intended to give a sense of the bigger picture of Iranian society, as well as custom, self-reflexive, and with obvious framing devices (observing adult behavior from a child’s perspective, driving through the city with different passengers, summing up a marriage in front of a judge – to refer to just a few high-profile Iranian films from the past decades).

However, as it is the case with many new waves and cinemas, the fragment of yearly production that is visible abroad is a small and misleadingly homogenous one, while the view from within the borders of Iran is radically different. Reza Mirkarimi, Director of Fajr International Film Festival, claims that there were 60 Iranian film submissions for this edition of FIFF, while the total number of films made within a year is even higher – reportedly, 90-100 features every year, with over 130 made between March 2016 and March 2017. The overall production (you guessed it) is trying to do many different things beside emulating Kiarostami and Panahi.

But I would like to properly begin by making a specification about the Fajr festival – the source for a potential confusion that took me the first two days of the festival to clear up completely. A couple of months ahead of the international festival, there is the national event where a larger number of Iranian films is being shown, some of which are only programmed during FIFF as market screenings in order not to affect their chances to have an international-festival premiere somewhere else. What is added with FIFF is, well, the “international” bit of the programming, a line-up of recent festival darlings from around the world. According to the festival regulations, the team is on the lookout for films “that seek justice, defend the oppressed and underline humane and moral values.” Since several of the titles in the selection are by now well-known, I believe it is useful to give an overall impression: Cristian Mungiu’s GRADUATION / BACALAUREAT (2016), Agnieszka Holland's SPOOR / POKOT (2017), Andrzej Wajda's AFTERIMAGE / POWIDOKI (2016), the Dardenne brothers' THE UNKNOWN GIRL / LA FILLE INCONNUE (2016), François Ozon's FRANTZ (2016). The listed films are all tempered social critiques, with most of them taking no sides, although I will say that SPOOR is – due to its ending, which I will not spoil – radically ecologist.

Some of the international films might have worked well as double bills, especially Kim Ki-duk’s THE NET / GEUMUL (2016) and Bulgarian filmmakers Kristina Grozeva & Petar Valchanov’s GLORY / SLAVA (2016). The former – appropriately named for its tightly knit narrative construction – follows a North-Korean fisherman, Nam Chul-woo (Ryoo Seung-bum), whose boat engine malfunctions and, before he knows it, he drifts to the coast of South Korea. Held in awe as the author’s one-off political film, it might after all be about something rather philosophical, like the blight of power and/or the hopelessness of an individual who is unlucky enough to get caught between the wheels of the social machinery. It is hardly more socio-economically precise than, say, Park Chan-wook’s OLDBOY / OLDEUBOI (2003).

In a concrete sense, the fisherman suffers from the strictness of the South Korean intelligence service – he is suspected of being a spy until he is proven innocent and falls into the hands of an agent who does not shy away from using torture to get confessions. Back in North Korea, after having endured a lot, the protagonist is suspected of having been seduced by capitalism with his brief glimpse of a better life, and this time he is a suspect to his own government. Bottom line is: do not get on the wrong side of people who can ruin your life in the name of higher order. Although the protagonist is a larger-than-life honest citizen (and would hardly be believable were it not for the actor’s restrained ferocity in facing his oppressors), several allegorical scenes in the film are pretty effective: Nam Chul-woo is left alone on a Seoul street and desperately tries to keep his eyes closed, to resist taking in images of capitalism and a different way of life than the one he made for himself. The souvenir he takes home from South Korea is so innocent that it only becomes ridiculous when authorities of his homeland classify it as “evidence.” In short, Kim Ki-duk convincingly constructs a negative world view, and there is definitely a lot of craft to how the misery keeps on coming, but it helps to be a pessimist from the start to get on his wavelength.

In GLORY, a stuttered railway worker finds a pile of money on the train tracks and decides to hand it over to the authorities, and his honesty similarly does him in. Before he knows it, he is stuck between, on one side, the Ministry of Transport (they hold a public ceremony in his praise but otherwise neglect to pay him the previous months’ salaries and “award” him by giving him a watch while losing the better one he had already) and, on the other side, the press. The protagonist finds sympathy with a journalist for the way he has been mistreated by the Ministry, but is soon abandoned again and further abused by the Ministry for being a snitch. Again, the story, inspired by actual events and co-authored with screenwriter Decho Taralezhkov, strikes a chord for viewers who are cynical about social order in Eastern Europe – a temptation that is truly hard to resist, especially with the majority of us who work for neither the government, nor the press, and are forced to passively observe as everything goes awry. There are several fine touches in GLORY – for example, Stefan Denolyubov handles his character’s speech impediment as just one element of his life-long aloofness. He never thought to claim his rights before, and when he finally dared to do it, he discovered he does not have the necessary skills. The ceremony in his honor makes for a well-scripted scene: it is mostly a PR show of Ministry insiders, directing an extra to make the Minister look good on stage.

Since I had heard of what Iranian films are not allowed to show (kisses, nudity, women’s uncovered heads, physical contact between male and female performers who are not married in real life) I must admit I was curious as to how these restrictions applied to foreign films, since they did not need to respect them from script development onwards. By themselves, THE NET and GLORY, which I had not seen before FIFF, gave me an introduction to what censorship looked like. A woman wearing (what seemed to be) a sexy red dress in THE NET had her silhouette completely blurred out. Another woman, this time in GLORY, quietly sitting in the background and showing somewhat of a cleavage, had an extra patch of blurred pixels added on top of her blouse. Naked women’s legs (but not men’s legs!) were also hidden. To me, paradoxically, these edits rather had the effect of drawing attention to details that would not have seemed erotic in an unmodified shot. Festival films are less regulated to conform with morality than those aimed at a larger audience, and earnestness could not have been unflinchingly observed as the programmers selected Werner Herzog’s SALT AND FIRE (2016), but it seems to still be hard to find films that do not need edits.

The most moving film I have seen was Rithy Panh’s EXILE / EXIL (2016), which continues the endeavor of his THE MISSING PICTURE / L'IMAGE MANQUANTE (2013) of retelling recent history, for which no official image archive exists. A poetic reenactment of human suffering in late 1970s Cambodia (then known as Democratic Kampuchea), it takes place entirely inside a hut (or, more precisely, a theatrical set resembling it) and has a sole character – a nameless, quiet young male, whom one might suspect of being the filmmaker’s alter ego. The space is versatile enough to gain cosmic dimensions – a cardboard cut-out of the moon and a flock of menacing seagulls appear on occasion, hovering over the protagonist’s head, the floor magically morphs into a field or a patch of grass.

One scene is a leveled-surface reenactment of a Sisyphean task: as the man rolls a boulder from one wall of the room to the other, another boulder appears (through a cross-fade) where the first one had been. There are biographical allusions in the film, including a picture of a woman we assume to be Rithy Panh’s mother – but it all builds up to an essay film of life in poverty and isolation rather than anything more narratively precise. Close-ups of the protagonist eating an insect, or a chicken that does not come in ready-made crispy nuggets, remind viewers that basic survival is historically not a timeless, universal human right. The soundtrack is made up on meditations on exile that are no less devastating for being abstract – from thinkers and artists (Karl Marx, René Clair) to political leaders (Ho Chi Minh) – and their rapport to the image is always loose, engaging spectators in a poetic guessing-game.

Turning to even more recent history, Fajr IFF had a section of (mostly Iranian) films and documentaries, grouped in the section Broken Olive Trees. Among them was THE DARK WIND / REŞEBA (2016), an Iraqi-German-Qatari coproduction, directed by Hussein Hassan, about a Yazidi woman who escapes after being captured by the Islamic State but upon returning to Kurdistan is rejected by the family of her fiancé for losing her honor. Majed Neisi’s THE BLACK FLAG / PARCHAM E SIAAH (2015) documents the frontline of an Iraqi offensive against ISIS. I have unfortunately missed them due to conflicting scheduling, but I am still hoping to catch up with them somewhere else – they have been previously screened in the Stockholm International Film Festival and Busan, and Visions du Réel, respectively.

Going back full-circle to the Iranian films, let me state again that I was surprised by the diversity of their influences, though I would not necessarily say that all of them bring the influences to a cohesive whole. Fereydoun Jayrani's ASPHYXIA / KHAFEGI (2017) is a bleak film about a nun which might have gotten tricks on how to light somber interiors from Paweł Pawlikowski's IDA (2013). The nun, also facing dilemmas about her future, takes care of a sick woman gone mute who seems to be repressing something about her marriage, so there is a hint of Bergman's PERSONA (1966) in it, too, or is it George Cukor's GASLIGHT (1944)? Sadly, the narrative seems to switch to something else every time a certain element becomes interesting. Rambod Javan’s NEGAR (2017) entangles an investigation, fast-paced chases, the main female character’s rich-girl fascination, and several where-did-this-come-from dream sequences is frustrating in a similar way.

The purest genre film I saw (admittedly missing many, including the top-prize winner, Asghar Yousefinejad's 2017 directorial debut THE HOME / EV) is Alireza Davoodnejad’s FERRARI (2017) – it is mostly a city-traffic road movie featuring a girl whose interests are definitely less than spiritual (jewelry and expensive things in general, plus the eponymous rarity on wheels) and a driver who sees her defencelessly wandering around and has the chivalry to help. Moralizing overtones are hard to miss, but both characters are lively and their obstacle course is sufficiently engaging, although the end goal is by anyone’s perspective rather frivolous (the girl wants to find the Ferrari and take a photo with it to spite a friend), there is enough going on to maintain the suspense.

Certainly, there is a lot more to discover than I could have possibly absorbed in a week – especially since, being in Tehran, it was hard to resist the temptation to wander away from the cinema. Despite the Abbas Kiarostami poster exhibition, commissioned by the festival in his memory and lining the hallway of the Charsou cinema, a large part of recent Iranian production was less familiar than I had expected. I left the festival with the commitment to watch out for films that might otherwise fly under my radar – aside from the promise to fly back to Iran to visit Shiraz, and the Instagram handles of several of the Iranians I have met.