Nisimazine Tehran #2

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Nisimazine Tehran 2 A Magazine Created By Nisi Masa, European Network Of Young CinemA

Mehdi Torfi Dreaming America Jorgen Leth

Editorial

NISIMAZINE TEHRAN Wednesday 15 October 2008 A magazine published by NISI MASA – network of young European cinema,

Chacun son cinema

in cooperation with the Cinéma Verité - Iran International Documentary Film Festival,

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t the 2007 Cannes film festival there was an omnibus film called Chacun son cinéma (To Each His Cinema). Thinking about this title, I wonder: Does it mean that each director has his or her own style and way of expressing themselves which is different and unique? Or does it mean that everybody can be a film director? When I see digital cameras and all the equipment now readily available to all, I am tempted to believe the second interpretation.

Everybody has a story to tell. Personal drama has always existed and now digital is offering the opportunity to all of us to be a filmmaker and share these stories.

We can shoot a movie, edit it and even screen it all by ourselves; the digital camera has brought democracy to filmmaking. In this domain there is no discrimination or prejudice.

The influence of digital is perhaps most obvious in documentaries. Anything can Happen, our ‘Film of the day’ in this issue, deals with everyday life, and yet thanks to a good idea the result is special. Any of us can make a wonderful movie: we just have to train our senses to observe everything better. A documentary film festival such as Cinéma Verité can help to obtain this goal. This is the second festival and as I remember we had a very crowded first one. I think Iranian people like to learn how to express themselves better, and I suppose that they have lots of stories to tell…

and with the support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Iran.

EDITORIAL Editors-In-Chief Matthieu Darras, Jalil Akbari Sehat Editorial Secretaries Jude Lister, Kaveh Jalali Art Director Hossein Norouzi Contributors Maartje Alders Ali Ameri Pablo Garcia Mateo Lasse Lecklin Réka Szalkai Farzaneh Tariverdi Anna Weitz Rebecca Wilson Ladan Zarei Nilofar Zarei Cover photo: Taxi to the Dark Side NISI MASA (European Office) 10 rue de l’Echiquier 75010, Paris, France +33 (0)6 32 61 70 26 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com

Kaveh Jalali

Picture of the Day

Photo by Pablo Garcia (ArtPau)

Film of the Day Anything can Happen Marcel Lozinski (Poland)

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hat does a little boy do in a park? He runs around wildly, chasing butterflies. And what do old people do in a park? They sit on a bench, enjoy the sunshine if there is any to be had, and have a chat - if there is any to be had. Marcel Lozinski cleverly decided to bring these age groups together in the award-winning, Oscar-nominated Anything can Happen (Wszyztko moze sie przytrafic, 1995).

The Polish director films his son Tomek, just turned six, as he prances around a park on a glorious spring day; speeding along on his scooter, gazing at the squirrels and the sparrows he feeds in innocent wonder, and generally being charmingly exuberant. In this park, various elderly people are doing their own thing on the benches, in couples or alone. As children do, little Tomek engages them in conversation, asking them candid questions such as: “How old are you? Will you still be alive when I’m your age?”

Marcel Lozinski had been the most promising documentary maker of his generation, but after decades of dealing with censorship, he had more or less given up. It was only after the regime change that he became inspired again.

This film, said to epitomize his movement towards a more ‘existential phase’, gained him the recognition he enjoys today. And existential it is. One can only wonder how many hours of mindless chat were thrown out, or how carefully Lozinski, who is known for his staged scenes, prepped his son. But the conversations between the boy and the elderly folks are of immense depth, mainly covering the essential

topics of life, love, death and growing up. Yet, these issues are discussed with great clarity and simplicity, as you do when talking to a child, and above all honesty: this doesn’t become as sickly sweet as a greetings card because, well, life isn’t like that.

In fact, life is best when you are little, as one old lady tells Tomek. An old man gives a history lecture in his own personal way: “What we went through, I wouldn’t want you to experience that. You should have a better life.” But Tomek feels sure that these people’s lives aren’t over yet. Anything can happen in life. You can live to a previously unheard of age. You can even meet a baby dinosaur. The old people also know that anything can happen. You can grow up wanting to be a farmer, but end up a janitor. In the future Tomek too can get divorced and end up on the streets, just like the woman who has left an alcoholic husband. Tomek doesn’t realize this yet; he doesn’t think further ahead than the possibility of his own parents getting separated.

Thus we see life’s journey symbolized in these dialogues.

Tomek is the carefree, blank slate of youth. He has his whole life ahead of him. Yes, anything can happen, it doesn’t matter, for as you grow older, you grow more accepting of life. “I’m just very glad I can walk”, says the man with swollen legs. “I’m alone, but not sad” says a woman.

This is the achievement of old age. In the last shot, Tomek joyfully rides his scooter away from the viewer. As we see him from the back, setting off into the future, a peacock crosses the road – a symbol for the mortality of man.

Vanitas vanitatum.

Rebecca Wilson

Excerpts from the Message of Mohammad Hossein Saffar Harandi, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance on the Occasion of the 2nd Annual Cinema Verité

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n the Name of God Currently, Iranian Cinema is experiencing new conditions and is to pave a new way. It is an endeavor that demands attention to the modern media requirements and knowledge of technological advances from production to screening stages. Therefore, while promoting and developing documentary cinema, one must also consider the creation and

exchanges of thoughts in this field seriously. At the same time, protecting the untainted and creative world of young generation aimed to be the future cinematographers of our country is a prerequisite that must not be ignored.

The prosperity of documentary cinema, which has been accelerated with the organization of Cinema Verité Festival, may launch even more productive and influential trends in future. We

hope that this precious cultural event would highlight the need for more attention to the broad domain of documentary cinema with all its numerous potentials, while bestowing the artists of Islamic Iran considerable benefits. I pray for the success of all those involved in the sphere of thought and culture in their efforts to take this rewarding yet risky path.

Reviews Children of Stalin Harrie Timmermans (The Netherlands)

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My soul is like a snowflake. You’re melting it.” A mentally ill patient is under examination, and it hurts.

He is failing the doctor’s test on logical thinking. Besides, he cannot think right now because he is starving he says. Neglected patients, shabby facilities and fragmentary conversations are the main ingredients of the disturbingly seducing Children of Stalin by Dutch director Harrie Timmermans, set at the Surami Mental Hospital in Georgia.

Since Soviet times the clinic’s number of patients has decreased from more than 700 to around 70 today. The residents – some of whom don’t even know why they’ve been locked up – range from depressed women left behind by their families to severely mentally disabled patients. Most are only fleetingly observed through Timmermans’ lens, but some thirst for more attention. A woman even sings and dances, happy about the big number of friends she’s made amongst the patients.

Timmermans documented the same hospital as a stills photographer ten years before. But he decided to return to capture the slow passage of time in the hospital, “something only possible in moving images”. Extraordinary camerawork

with long sweeping steady cam shots creates the compelling illusion of actually strolling through the anxiety-ridden corridors and dormitories yourself. Indeed the cinematography distinguishes this documentary from other reports on the state of things in the psychiatric care.

Whilst calling on the curiosity of the viewer, the strict visual approach keeps the filmmaker at a safe distance from the ugliness of human suffering. Thereby it also reproduces our general way of relating to people who are different. Easy to feel pity for, but difficult to give a hand.

Anna Weitz

Tinar Mehdi Moniri (Iran)

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boy is singing softly. Meanwhile he cuddles a calf, kissing it affectionately on the cheek and plucking its eyebrows. It’s a sunny spring day, somewhere on a hillside in Darmavand, Iran. Mehdi Moniri has made a beautiful portrait of Ghasem, a young cowherd who spends most of his time in the company of just a few animals.

During the sunny days Ghasem runs over the mountains, the light playing off the backs of the animals he herds. He fights and plays with them as if they were his siblings – the real ones he sees very rarely. His father remarried after his mother’s death and lives with his new family further down the mountain, keeping Ghasem on the mountain with the animals, like an unwanted souvenir from a former life.

When summer becomes fall, his contact with the outside world lessens with the fading of the warmth. He sings for the comfort of his own voice and screams at the elements from the top of his lungs. “Why are you so tough to cut?” he asks a tree he needs for fire in winter, whilst trying to saw it with a cold-ridden face. Finally out of the snow and warming his hands, he whispers that he would like to have a mother who takes care of him.

The filmmaker must have stayed really close to Ghasem, to be able to follow his life so intimately and over such a long period of time. In fact, in a way it’s comforting to know that the boy didn’t spent this harsh winter totally alone. Loneliness is ever-present through the surroundings he constantly has to struggle with, such as the miles he walks with a small horse to transport one container of milk over the snowy mountains.

The film is very physical; every flexing muscle, ripped nail and blister is captured with the same as detail as a glistening raindrop or ray of sun shining through a broken roof.

Tinar is a film that you can’t say anything negative about.

Maybe that’s its only flaw, that it is too perfect to make a lasting impression.

Maartje Alders

Interview Mehdi Torfi

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Mehdi Torfi (23) has recently finished Azadi Cinema, the poetic biography of a cinema in Khouzestan. Just in time for the national competition.

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an you tell us something about your background?

I grew up in Sousangerd, in the province of Khouzestan. I went to art school in Tehran, where I studied cinema and creative writing, but I left before I finished. I write poetry and short stories as well as making films. For the first film I made, I won an award at a film festival in Austria in 1382 (2003), and I have won some more prizes since then. So far, I’ve made ten fiction films and two documentaries, not counting my latest film Azadi Cinema, the final version of which will be shown for the first time here at the festival.

Azadi Cinema is a very poetic film. Does the fact that you’re a poet influence the way you make films?

Well, not directly, I write poetry mainly for myself, but I do think literature is the highest of the seven arts. I like films that are based on literature, and I aim for that in my own work as well.

Which directors have influenced you?

Actually, I don’t like it when people are heavily influenced by specific films or directors. As for me, I just think about scenes I liked or other things I noticed in different films. But if I had to name influences I would say Naser Taghvaie and Amir Naderi.

How did you come across the theme of Azadi Cinema?

I wanted to make a documentary about my native province of Khouzestan. When I was doing research in Sousangerd, I stumbled across this Azadi Cinema where I used to go as a child. I decided to tell its story. It was burned down twice, during the Revolution and then during the war with Iraq. The owner of the cinema had passed away, so I decided to have his ghost tell the story of his ‘house’; this cinema where so many old people went to see The Godfather or Papillon.

Have you showed it to the people of Sousangerd?

Yes, and they liked it very much. For them, it was a very important and interesting film. I wanted to make a nostalgic film, to make a connection between the people in the cinema and their memories. The story of this cinema is not unique. Events of the last decades in the country destroyed many cinemas. In Ahwaz there used to be sixteen cinemas, since the war there are only four left.

How important is this setting in Khouzestan to you?

The Arab people who live in Khouzestan have a very specific culture; their own language, poetry, clothes.

Photo by Pablo Garcia (ArtPau)

Some of my fiction films are set there as well. For me, it’s important that my films help gain more recognition for this culture. In a positive way – I don’t want to show just the war zone that it has become. The houses are in ruins, you see bullet holes everywhere, and almost everyone has lost members of their family in the war. You can feel the sadness there; the people seem to have lost the will to live. The border is a river, dividing the people of their culture between Iran and Iraq. And just across this river are the American soldiers; the people fear another war.

This situation there is so bad, I decided to make my next film about it.

Will it be a documentary?

It will be a fiction actually. It is about an Iraqi soldier who flees to Iran to escape the war with America. But there he sees an Iranian soldier he had injured in the war between Iran and Iraq. He wants to flee from this confrontation too. The soldiers have to face another war – a mental one. The story is told through the eyes of a dog that the Iraqi steals along the way. Looking through the eyes of this animal, we do not have to choose between the two human beings; the sadness is told in an indirect way.

Maartje Alders and Rebecca Wilson

Into the Festival The Asian Network of Documentary

Starting with the inauguration of the biennially-held Yamagata Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) in 1989, several film festivals serving as showcases for documentaries popped up in Eastern Asia during the 1990s. At the same time repressive governments (such as in Taiwan and Korea) were overturned and the digital revolution expanded the accessibility of filmmaking. AND started as a network of documentary film festivals in 2004; since 2006 it has been able to offer around 110 000 US dollars annually in production support to up to fifteen Asian documentary projects through the AND Fund.

“The meaning of the fund is not only about receiving a modest cash prize, but also to offer some kind of moral support for a filmmaker in the midst of a project” says Hyosook Hong.

Filmmakers who have their projects selected are invited to the Pusan International Film Festival. There they get the chance to show each other, as well as more experienced filmmakers, their rough cuts of works in production, in order to share opinions.

Daughter of Chorolque

“We witnessed the birth and vibrant growth of independent documentaries all across eastern Asia and recognized the necessity of networking”. Hysosook Hong, Executive Manager of the Asian Network of Documentary (AND), recounts the beginning of a joint effort to support emerging documentary filmmakers through training, fundraising and distribution. Parts of its results can be seen at Cinéma Verité Tehran in the program ‘Mirror of the festival: YIDFF & AND’.

Eventually, the results of the projects co-funded by AND are brought to different parts of Asia and Europe by the ‘AND Showcase’, as for example here at the festival.

Amongst the films screened in Tehran is Korean director Misun Park’s Daughter of Chorolque, a visually and socially engaging story about the heroines working in a Bolivian mine 5 600 metres above sea level. Also Korean, Kim JinYul takes on female emancipation from another perspective in the optimistic Jin-ok Sister Goes to School, which portrays the life of a woman with cerebral palsy. In one of the Japanese films, A Permanent Part-Timer in Distress, Hiroki Iwabuchi records himself in his doubts about ending the ‘part-timer life’ he, as a third of all Japanese workers and a growing number of people all over the world, experience today.

Anna Weitz

3 questions to Tahereh Hassanzadeh Tahereh Hassanzadeh is an Iranian director who’s project Virgin recently got selected for the AND Fund 2008. Virgin looks at the question of virginity for Iranian girls and explores the medical process to prove that the hymen is intact before marriage.

What does being selected for the AND Fund mean to you?

It was really a relief to finally get some support for this film. I have been looking for financers for five years and eventually I had to take a personal loan from a friend to be able to make it. Now I am able to finish it, and actually it’s only the subtitles which are missing now.

Why this topic?

I came to the film world from medicine.

Working as a midwife I met single girls that had problems because they had lost their virginity for some reason, and I am very happy that I can now inform others about it. It’s important to make a difference between girls who lost their virginity because of a failed marriage or even a disease and, for example, a prostituted woman.

Why do you think your project was selected?

I think the jury selected the film because they liked my special point of view on the subject. I also think they liked the sound in the rough cut I brought. I was selected for a sound master class at the festival in Pusan.

Ladan Zarei & Anna Weitz Photo by Lasse Lecklin

Work in progress Dreaming America: The Iraq War from a US perspective

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fter watching the films of the ‘America – Post America’ section, I couldn’t help but stumble away feeling slightly queasy. The ongoing situation in Iraq has become increasingly complex and raises ever more questions that beg for answers. In a time of extreme measures and radicalising opinions, who is going to pour some nuance into the mix?

Taxi to the Dark Side by Alex Gibney introduces Dilawar, a taxi driver who was tortured and killed in Bagram prison (predecessor of Abu Ghraib) in his country Afghanistan after being wrongfully accused of terrorism. His story opens the door for an exposure of the American government’s breaking of the 1949 Geneva Convention, through torturing prisoners of war by means of sensory deprivation combined with psychological and sexual assault. The film’s structure is mainly based on the eyewitness accounts of the torturers themselves which, paradoxically, attempt to convey compassion.

These soldiers, who were convicted for their involvement in what happened at Bagram, are presented as scapegoats, fallen victim to the whims of the higher echelons. In contrast, Dilawar and the other prisoners stay out of reach, only seen in photographs and through the guiding voiceover. Further distance from the prisoners is created through the imagery used; we see the tortured as they were seen by their torturers, in their sickening uncensored snapshots and videos.

While the film attempts to ask some interesting questions about democracy and what this still means today, I found this movie not only hard to watch because of these images, but moreover because it’s ignoring more fundamental questions.

What is guilt exactly and where does it lay? Who are these people treated so inhumanly? Just one villager is asked a question at the end of the movie, but his answer fits neatly into the story and does not add any new or interesting layer.

At a time when we in the West are becoming almost indifferent to the next news item of a suicide bomb in Baghdad, a film dealing with this topic but ignoring those questions

does not facilitate a genuine compassion for the other side of the story. The xenophobia that partly created the escalation of events in the Middle East is still in place.

But where Taxi is in a way critical of the American system, Full Battle Rattle by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss is not. Somewhere in the Mojave Desert the US army has recreated a small-scale Iraq with several villages temporarily inhabited by Iraqi refugees. Here battalions are trained before going on to the real deal, during a two-week live action role-playing programme.

In a way, this movie is a metaphor for the war and an alarming insight into the hopelessness of the situation, even if it’s just in staged form. Some of the participants, such as Lt. Col. Robert McLaughlin, will leave for Iraq with more self-doubt.

But the way this movie is structured and edited undermines the intention of being observant. A combination of interviewees mostly saying things that fit in a pro-American frame and the underscoring of the manipulative soundtrack make this film highly subjective. I was waiting for the soldiers to really go to Iraq, but the movie never took me there. It stayed in its comfort zone, on its own side of the ocean.

My feeling of discomfort after watching these movies came about through a clash with my own opinions and expectations.

I was expecting answers that I never got. But how do these looks at the war and at America equate to reality? Are Americans dreaming America? Or does everybody dream America? How well do we know it through just the pictures we see? This perhaps touches on the ever-problematic aspect of the documentary genre: we are expecting to see a reality, but whose reality is this and what are we going to do with it? If these are the kind of movies which represent and are shown as the reality of the current attitude of America towards Iraq and the Middle East, I cannot help but wonder if they will just polarise opinions even further, or if they could be used to start useful debate.

Maartje Alders

Jørgen Leth

Portrait

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I take notes because I want to remember what I have seen”, claims Jørgen Leth in his film Note Book from China (1987), which is a long journey by train across the country. His travel films, presented at this year’s festival, have at least one thing in common: they are all based on Leth’s personal observations and on the artist’s curiosity. It is his personal interest and the will to learn that defines them. Leth sees rhythm as something crucial in his films. “Everything is repetition, but nothing repeats itself”, he says in Moments of Play (1986). It shows different aspects of the playing human (rather children) through scenes of games and traditions while travelling through eight countries on three continents.

The key is to find new things in the repeating scenes.

Leth is a poet and film director who is considered to be a leading figure in the development of Danish experimental documentary filmmaking. His first short film The Perfect Human was his breakthrough in 1967 (also cited in Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions). Its lyrical presentations are echoed in Leth’s first travel film 66 Scenes from America (1981). This film is a photo essay, or nearly a photo album, in a poetic and sometimes romantic style with music by Eric Satie and sequences of sunset on the American road. Andy Warhol appears in the middle of the film, eating one of his own symbols, a hamburger. He comments on the scene later on: “I just finished eating a hamburger”, though he left the last pieces in the paper bag. Is he hiding away the remains of pop culture? Also shown in Tehran is the ‘second part’ of this movie: New Scenes from America (2002). Leth seems unaffected by the influences of September 11th, even though he shows the towers fell. The taxi drivers of New York’s streets are still there, most of them are still immigrants; just the country of origin may be different.

But let’s jump in space and a bit in time as well: Haiti. Untitled (1996) is according to Leth’s own words an ‘ultimate’ film, wanting to cover all aspects of Haitian life. This is shown by the fluidity of time, as it was made over a long period. Leth had lived on the island for a while and later on even became the Danish consul in Haiti. The ultimate is also underlined by the mixture of materials, as he was shooting both on High 8 and 35 mm, depending on the situation. The film has footage from the time of a left-wing military regime on the island from 1991 until 1994, after the president was forced into exile. But politics runs beside private life. American soldiers are shown in action, but also when they are calling home with tears in their eyes. The complexity of life on the island is marked by the poverty of everyday life and the tragedy of death runs parallel with the colours of the voodoo ceremonies and the beauty of the Haitian women.

The two naked women portraits in the film (one of them is a Naivist poet reading her own poem) remind us of Gauguin: the European image artist lost in the beauty of exotic rotundity. The inspiration of painting is inevitable: no coincidence that Leth later dedicated a whole film to Haitian artists (Dreamers, 2002).

And last but not least, we can also watch as part of this tribute Leth’s latest travel film Aarhus (2005). This is not a journey in space, but in time, in Leth’s good old poetic style. As his own tribute to his Danish hometown, the director returns and talks about his childhood and youthful memories connected to the city. Now we understand better; you can be a worldly filmmaker and citizen only if you are also able to travel in your own neighbourhood. On the wings of the pictures’ and the words’ poetry, that is what Jørgen Leth has been doing all his life.

Réka Szalkai