Iran, Obama & Auden

Films

Not a lot of them make it to US but I learnt a lot about Iran from their films. My favourites, which I'd like to recommend are:

The Day I Became a Woman (3 novellas, each about a different stage of life of Iranian women)
The White Balloon (a day in life of an Iranian girl)
Offside (it's difficult for a girl to be a soccer fan in Iran)

There was another good one, about a blind boy, but I don't remember its title.

Iranian directors face a lot of the same problems (censorship) that Polish ones did when I was growing up, so they use the same "zig-zagging" way around; they concentrate on seemingly innocuous subjects -- like children -- and load them with as many political metaphors as they think they can get away with. Takes rather focused watching to see beyond the obvious, but it's very rewarding overall.

If well done, films, like all fiction, can open a window on other ways of life and bring other perspectives closer to one's understanding...  

---

by: libra @ Fri Jun 12, 2009 at 22:37:14 PM CDT

Oh, yeah, good films

can, libra. There was a critically acclaimed film made by an Iranian director that I saw years ago when I lived in New York. I can't remember the title, and much of it is a blur to me now, part of that wonderful, small-art-films- seen-once that unspools in the small art-house of one's head, one's memory, but I believe it was made by an emigre living in Paris. It was, I dimly recall, about an exiled businessman who'd had ties to the Shah now living in Paris and being pursued by the Savak.

It came out, for what it's worth, a few years after a major Andrzej Wajda retrospective, a revival of interest in him, including his then little-seen-in-the-US major films from the '50s and '50s (eg, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds). And certainly, as you say, a director like Wajda, whose father was a Polish cavalry officer murdered by the Soviets, had to treat some themes elliptically.

The Wajda revival, of course, happened around the time of the Solidarity movement and Walesa.  

---

by: benjaminwalterWV @ Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 06:43:51 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

I don't write poetry

never had the ear for it -  my work is all prose, argumentative at that.  

Peace.

This is my world and welcome to it

---

by: teacherken @ Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 18:59:10 PM CDT

What I was saying was...

that your better essays, such as the one on dkos yesterday about the importance of Eugene Robinson's column, have a certain tonal poetry that derives from the resonant humanity and generosity of your point of view.  

---

by: benjaminwalterWV @ Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 19:07:17 PM CDT

[ Parent ]