While western directors often just break social taboos and rely on the shock effects, Iranian directors, keeping in mind that everything is done “in the name of God”, translate contemplative spheres and spiritual categories into everyday life (and death).


Iranian films have won more and more international awards recently, and Iranian cinema has gradually grown up and matured, with authors becoming younger and topics and themes more diversified. Last year in Zagreb Iranian female directors showed us how, in spite of restrictive social codes and rules of representation (especially when it comes to women), there is room for creative freedom in their films. While Western directors often just break social taboos and rely on shock effects, Iranian directors, keeping in mind that everything is done “in the name of God”, translate contemplative spheres and spiritual categories into everyday life (and death). Moreover, they do not try to escape the polyphonies and/or dissonances that make up everyday Iranian life.


Seyed Reza Mir-Karimi, a screenwriter and director of the younger generation whose opus is a focus of this year’s program of Iranian films, is a typical offspring of traditional Iranian cinema for many reasons. Of his four films, two focus on children, who are often portrayed in the Iranian new wave (The Child and the Soldier; Under the Moonlight, 2001); two could be considered road films, a very popular genre among Iranian filmmakers (The Child and the Soldier; So Close, So Far, 2004); at least three of his films are religious parables with pronounced melodramatic elements (Here, a Shining Light, 2002). Traditional themes and conventions receive new treatments from reality and the transcendental domain. A child in Karimi’s film is a petty criminal without a family, but he enriches the life of his grown-up escort/”guardian” (the soldier in The Child and the Soldier) or, in the case of the wavering priest in Under the Moonlight, puts grownups back on track. The road is not just a physical link or barrier between the traditional, rural and modernized, urban Iran, it is also a metaphor for a lost sense of closeness, purity and self awareness. In searching throughout the desert for his sick son, the road takes the doctor in the existentialist drama So Close, So Far to a (symbolic) death and an emotional rebirth. Even though this film came the closest to Western standards of (modernist) film in its production and treatment of the topic of estrangement, the most popular Iranian film in Europe is the much more ascetic, second film by the same director, Under the Moonlight (which received the critics’ award in Cannes).


This program of Iranian films includes two films by other authors also from exotic geographic locales. The film Tears in the Cold (Aziz Allah Hamidnejhad, 2002) takes place in the middle of the Iranian-Iraqi border conflict. A Kurdish guerrilla fighter and an Iranian soldier meet during the war but their hostility is diminished during a heavy snow storm and turns into a platonic romance with an anti-war message. In the film Behind the Curtain of Fog (2005), made for young audiences, a deaf-mute boy and his teacher do not manage to overcome obstacles, forced upon them by society, to mutual trust and closeness, which makes this film by Parviz Sheikh Tadi a bitter and melancholy melodrama. In addition, it is a confirmation that Iranians do not want to sink their exotic and seemingly self-sufficient world into an illusion of serenity and perfection. (Diana Nenadić)