S & D: Iranian film

supposed to BE

I have seen it. It is good, but not as good as A Separation.

sooooo this is not a film is amazing

great -- gonna see it next wk.

yes

yes

i'm probably trampling into "spoilers" below, but

i keep thinking of the excerpt he played from the circle, and his commentary about the beams of the bus station informing our idea of the character's emotional state. like you can view the whole of this is not a film through that lens, in which the claustrophobia, and the implied mental reaction to his limited space - like having to resourcefully map out a rug with tape, having to rely on dvds and pre-shot iphone footage to sense the outside world - map out so much of what he feels, so much of the position he's in. the oscillations between 'truth' and 'artifice' are just fascinating - like his short emotional break as he reads the script, which seems to detract from the thing he's trying to express but actually enhances it. it's just so creative. and so perfectly measured, ie with the garbage collector in the lift.

The final shot ws kinda incredible too - here is a man who just suddenly finds he can't cross that line w/his camera (or otherwise), as if a piece of yellow tape that ws used prev to free up his imagination is being used to now restrict.

drudge siren: http://www.indiewire.com/article/exclusive-banned-from-filmmaking-jafar-panahi-has-made-another-movie-says-kiarostami#

That's great! Wonder how?

About Elly ws great! Good call to give this a cinema run.

50 films essential to understanding Iranian cinema

http://www.fandor.com/blog/the-iranian-film-50

so this is out now, yeah

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/60010/this-is-not-a-film/

via Fandor:

Abbas Kiarostami tells the Hollywood Reporter‘s Clarence Tsui that the students he teaches in Tehran are not only finding it more and more difficult to turn in new work, many of them can’t swing tuition anymore, either. “Without referring to specific political events or figures, Kiarostami said the situation in Iran has ‘never been this dark.’ He added: ‘And we have huge question marks in front of us now—some miracles should happen in Iran to save the nation.’ The director expressed hope that the upcoming presidential elections will bring about the miracle he is hoping for. ‘If I say [it won’t help], it would show I’m a pessimist,’ he said.”

http://m.hollywoodreporter.com/news/iranian-director-abbas-kiarostami-situation-559514

so Makhmalbaf's latest The Gardener, a doc about the Baha'i faith made with his son, is winding up a week's run here in NYC, and there was a kerfuffle last month.

Iran's expatriate filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf is facing withering condemnation in his homeland for attending a film festival in Israel, the Islamic Republi's archfoe.

The acclaimed director, considered a pioneer of moviemaking in Iran, traveled to the Jerusalem Film Festival this month to screen his latest work, "The Gardener," which explores the conflict between two generations about the role of religion in society.

Javad Shamgdari, the head of Iran's official cinema organization, penned a letter to the leadership of the Iranian cinema museum demanding the removal of all of the director's awards and trophies.

“Makhmalbaf made his first 10 films in Iran using the money of the state-run organizations to learn cinema,” Shamgdari was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Mehr news agency. “Now he has fallen into the arms of the occupier, the murderous Zionist regime.”

Members of Iran's artistic community have expressed mixed feelings about Makhmalbaf's visit to Israel.

Some 150 Iranian intellectuals, academics and artists signed a public letter assailing Makhmalbaf's action. However, 80 others lauded him in an open letter sent to the Times of Israel.

The letter to the Israeli newspaper applauded the filmmaker's “bravery for breaking the taboo of visiting the state of Israel and conveying the message of friendship between Iranian people and people of Israel.”

In intellectual circles in the Iranian capital, only those who criticized the filmmaker's visit agreed to speak on the record....

http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-iran-filmmaker-mohsen-makhmalbaf-israel-visit-20130723,0,2686091.story

have you seen it? as a baha'i i'm of course very interested

probably will go tonight if I'm not beat

It's quite a piece of work, why did I doubt? Not at all a primer on Baha'i -- I know a little more than I did when I went in, so almost nothing -- but a means of getting at Big Themes, and of presenting cinema as the Makhmalbafs' religion. Here's the Manohla Dargis review:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/movies/the-gardener-mohsen-makhmalbafs-inquiry-into-religion.html?_r=0

Also, more of this was in English than I expected (60-70%). And along those lines...

http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/makhmalbaf-to-shoot-first-english-language-feature/5059286.article

closed curtain so good. he is as good a director as anyone, i think. so rich.

yup. best film of the year, in my opinion, though obviously i haven't seen everything.

seeing it kinda just reminded me of how energising iranian film is - how much more than story it can be, & how close to life it gets. i loved to see him adjust the pressure of its metaphors - letting them either breathe & flex to our interpretation, or narrowing them to specifically address his own condition. & it's such a heavy film in light of that. it weaves in & out of this structure that really directly addresses, literally personifies a lot of issues, but it's also an extension of what he was doing in the last movie, i think, which is just transferring that weight onto himself, & then as well as that dropping crumbs that suggest those pressures elsewhere - the medicine delivered, &c. the directness of it as a piece of filmmaking is really catching, too; i really think he's like bresson or dreyer in how quietly measured everything is, the geography of the house, the confidence of the camera, the economy of the shots. there are so many moments of this that just totally spun me in my seat.

upcoming series at Asia Society in NYC:

http://asiasociety.org/new-york/iranian-new-wave-1960s-1970s-film-series

Just finished The White Balloon, and Panahi is just really underrated. The Mirror, The Circle and Crimson Gold are fantastic as well. I love how Closed Curtain answers things from This Is Not a Film, how this time it's so extremely filmic. Those two films combined is really some of the most important stuff that has been made this decade.

Saw panahi's Closed Curtain on Saturday night; well worth seeing. I felt the last third is kind of stopped in place -- it didn't bring me anyplace new -- and it's not as sui generis as This Is Not a Film, but perhaps that's not possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQyU7dpuLl4

ends July 22 - New York City, NY - Film Forum

opens
July 18 - Los Angeles, CA - Laemmle Music Hall
July 18 - San Diego, CA - Digital Gym Cinema
July 18 - San Francisco, CA - 4 Star Theatre

July 25 - Washington DC - West End Cinema
July 25 - Chicago, IL - Gene Siskel Film Center
July 25 - Santa Fe, NM - CCA Cinematheque
July 25 - New Orleans, LA - Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center

August 1 - Omaha, NE - Film Streams

August 21 and 23 - Bloomington, IN - Indiana University Cinema

August 24, 25, and 26 - Taos, NM - Taos Center for the Arts

I saw Children of Heaven recently and quite enjoyed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-gfNZqKULw

Yeah, Closed Curtain was the best film of 2013. People should go check it out.

SSSSPPPPPOOILLLEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRSSS

i do feel slightly constrained, with un film nist acting as an obvious comparison to this; it's obviously so much tighter, & more complete a metaphor. but i loved this & found it so affecting. frustrating reading the various blurbs by brody et al & knowing that the arrival of the third character is announced in advance; it was a real moment, for me, much as what happens in the mirror felt like a fresh, unexpected way of making films. has been awhile since i saw this, but i could still draw a blueprint of the layout of his house. so much to like about it, the smaller roles, the woman bringing food, & obviously the dog.

Hopefully this will be in London soon.

wow. i love that trailer. looks great.

felt a wee bit of old-fashioned dog awwwwws going in this, at least if Asta in The Thin Man was watching TV footage of slaughtered dogs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/iranian-film-festival-at-freer-gallery/2014/12/31/b526295e-8f72-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html

Mokri said that at first it was difficult to get “Fish & Cat” screened in Iran, in part because authorities had interpreted the mention of the year 1998, the movie’s reference to the restaurant scandal, as an allusion to a period of political killings in Iran. But after Hassan Rouhani (who has been described as a relative moderate) became president in 2013, “we had no problems, and we screened the film,” Mokri said.

Censorship was and is “very strong in Iran, both in terms of what you can make and what you can see,” Vick said. But more recently, he added, “because everybody can sneak around the rules and see things online or on satellite dishes,” Iranian directors have been able to enter more fully into dialogue with world cinema.

the iranian festival that's happening somewhere soon - at the mfa, maybe? - looks really great. still dying to see fish & cat.

The Washington D.C. showings at the Freer Gallery: Mokri is scheduled to appear at the Jan. 16 screening of “Fish & Cat,” which also airs Jan. 18.) Another festival highlight: “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” by director Mohammad Rasoulof, who shot the thriller in 2013 despite being banned by Iranian authorities from filmmaking for 20 years.

http://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp

http://www.mfa.org/programs/series/boston-festival-films-iran-0

Boston fest and DC one are showing some of the same films

Surprise: Taxi is yet another masterpiece from Jafar Panahi, who at this point doesn't really make anything less than that. A bit bewildering since there is a multitude of characters and voices, and a lot of them are reflections of characters in Panahi's earlier films, and I'm still not entirely sure of what some of it means. But it's so inventive, funny and humanistic.

so hyped

yup!

Hey, trailer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM2tblIkL4g

I love this film. Especially the warmth between Panahi and his niece. Who was also the one who received the Bear in february:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/02/14/25AEAC4300000578-0-image-a-57_1423946700438.jpg

I don't know where to post this - perhaps we need a 'best scenes at the moment'-thread - so I'm posting this here. Found this clip from A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, so far and away the best scene in the film, and one of the best scenes of the year imo (It's a 2015 release in Denmark).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuN4wcDGlIc

(and I don't even like thinking of it as strictly an 'Iranian' film. It IS Iranian, of course, in it's own way, but also American, and also exile-Iranian)

im a fan of panahi's earlier work, but didnt quite see the worth in taxi (or this is not a film either), beyond their very creation, and the lengths he had to go through to make them, which of course makes them an achievement of some merit, but im not sure the actual content measures up to their surreptitious conception. it took me a while to get past the fact he is basically just remaking ten, and really as memorably. all the old tropes of panahi's and his peers' old films are there (cutesey kids, bluring of docu realism and fiction, a drawing attention to the nature of film making itself), which i suppose is forgiveable, he is allowed to revisit himself, but it was all done without much in the way of surprise. there was also something weirdly smug and self regarding about the whole feel of the film as well, which got trying after a while. it touches on lots of interesting topics/themes, probably most memorably the idea of unscreenable films, which again is not a new theme for anyone familiar with iranian movies/directors, but this at least was explored more than the other characters, whose stories didnt really seem to add up to much, and were just minor glimpses that we are expected to read into more than they actually allow us to. in terms of that generation of iranian directors, makhmalbaf's the president was more impressive (though oddly got worse reviews). and if you want a real sequel/reprisal of ten, mania akbari's 10+4 was also better.

*really not as memorably

I really don't want to do this but..

Panahi's niece had a very meaty part. She wasn't cute but by turns manipulative and argumentative. Funny but no more than the adults. Panahi used their interactions to make points about making film as a practice. It was the opposite of 'cutesy' when he trotted out two nattering old ladies for The White Baloon re-creation.

You talk about the idea of unscreenable films as some abstract notion that he must 'make new' and refresh and innovate. But the reason these are rough-ish is precisely because these idiotic set of rules have been used to stop Panahi from making films the way he wants to. The stories didn't 'add up to much' because maybe they would need a wider scenario that couldn't be shot? But actually I found most of it quite coherent. Was it 'smug and self-regarding' to have the lawyer come in and talk about how her practice and work are being stopped by the Iranian government? The rose to the camera was applying a sentiment of solidarity in a similar way to Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence".

This was better than The President (although the ending almost made-up for the slluggish story) and liked it more than Ten although I need to re-watch that.

i said her part was given the most room for exploration (though argumentative and manipulative kids in iranian films is not a new thing), compared to the others, so we agree there. obviously her section had the most resonance, which im not disputing, but even though it does still hold weight, the fact is that you didnt really learn anything new about it, or anything fresh. i know its prob churlish to criticise it in light of how it was produced, and maybe im being a bit mean spirited, but for a director who comes from a generation of filmmakers who are quite expert in getting mileage out of constraints and working around what they have to deal with, i still think there was room for the film to go somewhere else, or to do more, say a bit more.

I really disagree with pretty much everything you are saying, not least because even most of the audience who have seen more than half a dozen Iranian films wouldn't really know then ins-and-outs of unscreenable films or the rules Panahi is meant to have broken beyond talking about things that he shouldn't have in his films. Your bigger mistake is in the notion of the way films break ground. Because I think these are doing just that at a very micro-level, in tiny steps, and in a way Panahi would never have gotten to if this ban wasn't imposed on him.

Think this trilogy of films as such really covers new ground in terms of constraint - its quite an act to flip these constraints around in the way he has and in the end actually re-boot the old-ish dynamic of totalitarian regime against the lone artist (Panahi has become a really great actor through these, although again its all playing with the notion of what is and isn't acted or planned).

I really can't recall such a grown-up conversation between a main actor and a child in most films so I don't think we agree where you think we agree.

The full story - how Panahi has managed to make two films post This is not a Film hasn't quite been told (or I haven't heard it) but that's for another time.

"I really can't recall such a grown-up conversation between a main actor and a child in most films so I don't think we agree where you think we agree."

you should check out ten again then, and 10+4

That's two films, one of which was made over a decade ago, which Panahi clearly drew on..

to be fair, i think the film is charming, amusing, playful, and all the stuff i expected it to be, which should be enough, but perhaps i just expected more.

"Your bigger mistake is in the notion of the way films break ground. Because I think these are doing just that at a very micro-level, in tiny steps, and in a way Panahi would never have gotten to if this ban wasn't imposed on him."

"Think this trilogy of films as such really covers new ground in terms of constraint - its quite an act to flip these constraints around in the way he has and in the end actually re-boot the old-ish dynamic of totalitarian regime against the lone artist"

id be interested to hear more on this.

not sure i would go so far as to call him a great actor, though he does do a good line in strained smiling