Iranian films Week screens extraordinary films

JAKARTA (JP): Iranian filmmakers continue to be talked about by film communities around the world for their excellent storytelling skills, many of which have been recognized in the prestigious world film festivals.

The Iranian Film Week, which was held this week at the H. Usmar Ismail film center, South Jakarta, screened seven of these much-acclaimed films, including films directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Darioush Mehrjui and Abbas Kiarostami.

One of the films shown during the week was an extraordinarily moving film titled The Father (Pedar, 1996) directed by 42-year- old Majid Majidi.

As in Majodi's Children of Heaven (or in most neorealist films), children are the focus in The Father.

However, while Children of Heaven mainly uses the children's point of view, The Father tells its story through both the children and adult's point of views.

The film concerns 14-year-old Mehrollah, who leaves his family to work at a city seaport to support the family after his father dies in a terrible accident.

However, when he returns home, he is disappointed and his pride is deeply hurt after finding out that his mother has remarried, with a local police officer, and taken his three younger sisters to live in his house.

Assisted by his loyal friend Latief, Mehrollah launches a protest to show his hatred of the cop.

As in Children of Heaven, the child roles in The Father are extremely well-acted.

Hassan Sadeghi as Mehrollah effectively gives a portrayal of a stone-hearted boy, like when he accuses his mother of remarrying the police officer just for his money.

Mehrollah's parentless sidekick, Latief, played by Hossein Abedini, is more than a comic relief with his portrayal of a boy dreaming of having enough money to leave the village.

An admirable fact about this movie is, the child actors really act, despite many art-house filmmakers' trend in using unfortunate children, such as street kids, to appear as themselves in their films.

A good example of this is the overpraised Garin Nugroho's film, Daun di Atas Bantal (Leaf on A Pillow), which features street children as themselves, including reenacting their not-so- right dailies for the sake of creating realistic scenes.

Parivash Nazarieh and Mohammad Kasebi, respectively Mehrollah's mother and stepfather, also give wonderful performances.

When Mehrollah steals his stepfather's pistol and sets out for the port town with Latief, his stepfather goes after him to bring him home. On their way back to the village the motorcycle breaks down and they become lost in the vast, merciless desert.

Suffering from thirst and fatigue, the stepfather collapses, but Mehrollah helps him to reach a spring, thus establishing a bond of filial attachment with his stepfather.

Beginning his career as an actor in 1980, Majidi directed his first feature, Baduck, in 1992, which won several awards and was shown during Director's Fortnight at Cannes. Before this film, he had made a number of short films and even worked as an assistant to Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Hope

Another extraordinary film shown during the film week was the unsettling The Peddler (Dastforoush, 1986).

This stunning film, directed by one of the most active artists of Iran's postrevolutionary period, is a trilogy of an unusual mixture of social commentary, humor and horror set among the poor of contemporary Tehran, while also showing amazing visual poetry -- striking with its inventive style and "audacity".

The first part of The Peddler, The New Born, is a gritty, unsettling display of anxiety and hope, based on a story by Italian neorealist Alberto Moravia of an impoverished family living in a slum.

The couple are cousins, and the wife is pregnant with their fifth child. Already having four crippled children, the husband tells his wife to leave the hospital without their newborn, believing the baby will eventually be crippled if they keep it. However, the wife returns home with the baby, a girl.

They then decide to give up the baby girl and go to a special hospital for abandoned, mentally handicapped children. The hospital refuses to accept the baby since she seems healthy.

When the mother strolls into the ward with her baby in her arms, she sees firsthand the deformed children sheltered in the hospital. Horrified by the children's desperate condition, she runs out of the hospital.

The couple then go downtown to find a good spot to leave the baby, hoping she will be picked up by a wealthy person.

Makhmalbaf mixes this unsettling segment with humor, which results in a more disturbing atmosphere.

Every time the couple leave the newborn at one spot, she is picked up by beggars, one of whom uses the baby right away as a tool to attract sympathy from passersby.

And the scene where the couple are mocked by pedestrians who disagree with the idea of parents abandoning their child is reminiscent of Italian neorealist The Bicycle Thief.

Sad, humiliated and desperate, the husband suggests they go to a wealthy family for whom he once worked and leave the baby by the swimming pool.

In a disturbing final shot, the baby ends up in the special hospital for mentally retarded children where, unbeknown to her parents, she is placed next to a severely deformed baby.

Eerie

The second part, The Birth of an Old Woman, features a mentally unstable young man, who takes care his invalid mother, confined to a wheelchair, in a rundown apartment located on a busy street.

Dutifully, he takes care their home while cooking and nursing his mother. At the same time, he also frenetically complains, as if the deteriorating, speechless old woman makes him do the work.

He threatens constantly to leave her to get married.

One day, the young man leaves his mother to go and collect their monthly stipend, promising to come back with hamburgers. On his way back, he is hit by a car and robbed by onlookers.

A creative style enables the film to tell the audience what the incredibly old, silent woman sees and feels as she is left on the balcony since the morning, wondering where her son is.

After her son is thrown out of a speeding car, which is supposed to take him to the hospital, the old woman sees a swan- shaped car pass by with her son waving his hands, yelling, "I'm happy now, mother!"

The scene turns incredibly creepy -- blurring the line between reality and hallucination -- when the old woman takes her last breath after a strange carriage arrives in front of the balcony, as if it were a vehicle to take away her spirit.

The last segment of The Peddler chronicles the last hours in the life of a peddler who witnesses the murder of a mafia member. After being abducted by a group of men, he imagines what might happen if he tries to escape. All this ends in his death.

In this segment, the peddler's imagination becomes increasingly vivid so that he and the audience begin not to be able to distinguish what is real and what is not.

In one eerie scene, the peddler succeeds in escaping and tries to hitch a ride from passing cars. Only one stops. He gets into the car only to find, to his horror, that the car runs with nobody behind the steering wheel.

Director Makhmalbaf, who is considered an equal of prominent film director Abbas Kiarostami, shows varied cinematic styles in his 20 short and feature films.

Makhmalbaf, born in a Teheran slum in 1951, often shows the spirit of neorealism. At the age of 15, he left school to form a group of religious activists to oppose the then regime under Shah Rheza Pahlevi. Two years later, he was imprisoned but spared being executed because he was under age.

Released from prison during the Islamic revolution, he began writing dozens of short stories, novels, plays and scripts, some of which are banned, to express his political and social views. (Joko E.H. Anwar)