Samira Makhmalbaf : At Five in the Afternoon

Also a lot of Iranian filmmakers have made films about Afghanistan recently. There are large numbers of Afghans in Iran (either immirgants to the cities or displaced along the border) and two major Iranian films of the 1990s addressed this, albeit in a nonpolemical way: Taste of Cherry and The White Balloon. More recently there's been Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar and Afghan Alphabet, neither of which I liked all that much. There's something just vaguely colonial about those films, as with many things undertaken (in part) in the spirit of charity.

Here's an article on the Makhmalbafs: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/22/makhmalbaf.html

What I was trying to say is that the idea of "Iranian film" a Western arthouse viewer would have, and the idea of "Iranian film" that an average Iranian would have, are probably quite different. I wonder if there's even any overlap.

Kiarostami in particular aims his product much more for a festival/overseas market and gets most of his funding from there as well. Iran itself is quite happy with this, giving in a cultural profile without being particularly challenging since Kiarostami isn't seen much. I think Samira Makhmalbaf is pretty talented, as mentioned above The Apple and Blackboards were both pretty good, but there is a degree of cultural imperialist priviliging going on with some reviews of Iranian cinema. Censorship in Iran is not that bad, there has been a large push for art post the split of church and state (and democratically Iran is pretty forward look). I saw a more popular Iranian film a couple of months ago (Beneath The Skin Of The City) which was a lot more gritty, populist and to my mind more enjoyable that Kiarostami.

kandahar was trash. it almost seemed like a cheap michael moore kinda crap thing. i didn't even realize it was a makhmalbaf until just now, actually.

but i guess the only other of his i've seen was a moment of innocence, which i found quietly whimsical, with a nod to godard or something.

blablablblabla why am i even posting on this thread?

oh yeah, i remember...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/740000/images/_742295_samira_makhmalbaf150.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/745000/images/_745372_makhmalbaf300.jpg

rrrowr.

god, i'm sorry...

please continue.

Haha. There were a few mentions of S.M. being "glamorous" in the various reports from Cannes. I see what they mean. It's certainly in contrast to her films.

I suppose this is the kind of thing that Kiarostami is trying to deal with when he includes himself (or a surrogate) in his films--the odd relationship between Westernized, well-off artistic elites from Teheran making films about uneducated, impoverished people in remote areas of Iran.