Nisimazine Tehran #4

Friday 17 October 2008

Nisimazine Tehran 4 A Magazine Created By Nisi Masa, European Network Of Young CinemA

A Road to Mecca Mohamad Shirvani Leila Kilani

Editorial

NISIMAZINE TEHRAN Friday 17 October 2008

J

ust take a look at a map of Iran, observe its neighbours: two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, have spent their recent years with the memory of cruel wars. The neighbours of Iran have many cultural commonalities with us.

Having blossomed to the age of adolescence, the young people in our neighbouring countries are making fantasies about love and happiness. Their fantasies have another colour, different from that of reality. The short films made by Iraqi and Afghani young people screened Tehran are not only reports on the current situation of the two countries but actually on the future of human beings. The 2nd Cinéma Vérité Festival has the potential to capture the life of young people in those countries in the first shot, something which is entangled with security crises, a passion for life and happiness. Then the festival can present it to the world, a task it is truly capable of accomplishing.

The grace of such a phenomenon is enhanced when the Western artist doesn’t censor him/herself and even criticizes the policies of his own country. Films like The Road to Guantanamo and Taxi to the Dark Side are notable manifestations of this sensibility.

As well as geographical proximity, the presence in Iran of poets, writers, artists and filmmakers of these two countries, which have experienced oppressive regimes, make them even closer to their Iranian counterparts who had passed the same experience.

We love cinema at film festivals as a window to see new things and are pleased with human efforts to see such novelties.

A magazine published by NISI MASA – network of young European cinema, in cooperation with the Cinéma Verité - Iran International Documentary Film Festival, 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: by Pablo Garcia (ArtPau) 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

Jalil Akbari Sehat

Picture of the Day

Photo by Lasse Lecklin

Film of the Day A Road to Mecca (The journey of Muhammad Asad) Georg Misch (Austria)

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Road to Mecca is a sort of road documentary in which Austrian filmmakers follow the path of Muhammad Asad, a journalist, writer and diplomat. Asad is best known as a man who built up bridges between Islam and the West over the course of the 20th century.

The film starts in Lviv (nowadays Western Ukraine), the AustroHungarian hometown of Leopold Weiss (1900-1992). Weiss was born Jewish, but converted to Islam in his twenties and translated his name into Arabic - from then on he was called Muhammad Asad (literally ‘lion’). The documentary travels along the path of Muhammad Asad’s life: from the Ukraine to Austria, Israel/Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. Although entering Mecca is not that simple for non-Muslim filmmakers, nevertheless it’s a part of the journey Asad made in his lifetime. The film then travels to Pakistan, the USA, Morocco and eventually Spain. The name ‘Road to Mecca’ actually refers to the autobiography of Mohammad Asad.

To convert from one religion to another is not a simple matter. When Muhammad Asad told his father in 1926 that he had converted to Islam already some time ago and even changed his name, he was never again to be mentioned in his Jewish family. Asad had to follow his own path, and so he did: in Saudi Arabia, he even befriended the King. Later on, he deeply involved himself in the birth of the Republic of Pakistan. This merited him a short envoi as the Pakistani representative in the United Nations. After a series of disillusionments in the political arena, our man moved to Morocco to make an acclaimed translation and commentary of the Qu’ran in English, a work of 17 years in total. At the end of his life he retired in solitude in Spain, close to Granada.

Whilst drawing the portrait of Muhammad Asad through re-visiting the key places of his life, Georg Misch seems to adopt the attitude of his subject. The Austrian director thus shows a lot of respect toward different people and beliefs. Maybe the only time somebody is shown in a questionable light is when the demographic planner of Israel tries to explain the idea behind the construction of the Israeli West Bank 8-metre-barrier that separates Israeli and Palestinian territories, quite controversially cutting Palestine off. “We here, them there” is the logic.

The film contains plenty of archive material: classical images, but also a precious voice-recorded interview and an equally precious photo album featuring black and white photos of Asad and people he met during his journey. The beautiful cinematography of Joerg Burger also compliments and contributes to the narrative. For instance, images of the Saudi-Arabian Nafud desert allow the spectator to understand Mohammad Asad’s viewpoint: “Living in the desert and travelling in the desert brings one closer to God. It was the feeling of absolute loneliness facing God, the feeling of insignificance, and absolute dependence on one central power.”

The further along the journey we are taken, the more we explore the many nuances of the man’s personality, and the more we get, through him, a seemingly more profound understanding of the current state of the Islamic World and Muslims. One question remains though: was Muhammad Asad – referred as ‘Europe’s gift to Islam’ – a modernist, or a reformist? The answer is to be found in Asad’s writings: “I am just a Muslim, who tries to find out in the text what is right at the current time.” A Road to Mecca portrays a lionhearted man with passion, modesty and a sense of situation; more often than not ahead of his time.

Lasse Lecklin

Reviews Children, as Time Flies Thomas Heise(Germany)

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hot in the former East-Germany, Children, as Time Flies (Kinder, wie die Zeit vergeht) is a poetic documentary relating a very simple story. A personal story which somehow becomes universal: everyone knows or has heard about families like the one featured in this film.

Tommy has a very young mother; there are only 16 years between them. A bus driver, her life is monotonous and not very mother-friendly. Her two smaller children and new partner occupy her time, leaving little space for Tommy.

He is over 15 years old, but still hasn't finished 7th grade, and risks being expelled. The only people he has in his life: his best friend and his girlfriend. The former is a Nazi, brought up in a family where the death of a German pop singer is a tragedy, while they ignore what their son is up to. He denies being racist, while confessing that he just hates the Turks.

Children is a ‘found story’: when shooting the first takes, the director Thomas Heise couldn't have predicted how the life of the young mother would develop. Repetition and prediction, in visuals and thereby in narration, are the structuring lines of the movie. Some images get their meaning only later on: it’s a puzzle, and we can only have the full picture by putting all the pieces in their right places.

The contemporary classical music, together with black and white pictures, only strengthens the alienation and feeling of sadness. This is a strong movie, whose power is not only

Conversation Lenka Clayton (UK) Conversation is one way of making a connection with others.

Lenka Clayton has made a film about just this. People - they are all British - are just sitting in front of the camera. We see two separate frames next to each other which change alternately at the beginning, revealing a series of different faces staring directly into the lens. After a few minutes, these faces start talking, and we soon realise that they have been asked to judge one other.

based on its cinematography, but rather on its atmosphere and structure.

Is there no hope for these people? In the last sequence Tommy builds a snowman with his friends. They leave and the camera stays fixed on the snowman. Childhood is left behind, and the adolescents are moving on to more ’manly’ activities (parties, fighting, etc). It seems that the future is not so promising. Although Children, as Time Flies doesn't give ideas on how to help people like Tommy or his friends and family, at least it lets us understand them better. Isn’t that the first step towards reconciliation in our society?

Réka Szalkai

The comments they come out with range from the humorous (a woman says of a young boy: “He looks like he’d stick a sticker on you on the bus”) to the downright insulting (“looks slightly psychotic”), and are at times surprisingly detailed (“Could be someone in administration or finance… but definitely she likes to be in charge”) or concerned (“That guy looks really unhappy, and angry about his life” says a young girl about a stern-faced older man).

We cannot understand whether they are face to face or even if they can see each other or not, but there is a kind of philosophy behind that; it’s the director’s clever way of putting you as a spectator in a situation that, consciously or unconsciously, makes you judge them too.

We do judge people in every moment. My impression was that when these people told what just came to their minds, their judgement was mostly based on what everybody might recognize at first glance. I believe that the eyes can talk; when you want to talk to somebody you need eye contact, but you can’t judge people on their appearance only.

Ladan Zarei

Interview Mohamad Shirvani

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The 444 days of the Iranian hostage crisis was precipitated by the seizure of the U. S Embassy in Tehran by students on 4 Nov. 1979 . On 20 Jan . 1981, minutes after the inauguration of the new president Ronald Reagan, Iranian students released the American citizens who had spent 444 days captive. Mohamad Shirvani decided to make a film of this page of Iranian history.

H

ow did the idea of this film come to your mind?

I had gone to New York to take part in the Tribeca film festival some years ago. The idea of this film came to my mind when I was getting around, chatting with people and when I was saying I was Iranian, everybody remembered the hostage taking in the US embassy. They were talking about it as if it happened recently. I was just six when it happened. I wanted to know the reality, the answer to the questions which I always had in my mind as to the reason of this hostility between Iran and the US, despite having a lot in common. Both Iranians and Americans are very religious and they are innocents.

It is said that the attack on the US embassy and hostage taking had more influence on Iran’s fate than the revolution.

Yes, because the war between Iran and Iraq, sanctions, etc. started from this point. Emam called the occupation of embassy ‘the second revolution’.

From the beginning, you intended the film to have this form?

I started out in painting and artistic cinema, so I have respect for the images. In the beginning, I was to make a feature following the style of Oliver Stone’s political films. I even shared the issue with Michel Moore, who welcomed it very much and he was to help me. I was going to shoot fifty percent of the film in Iran and the rest in America but it seemed that they didn’t like a director who is not very well known to do the job. So in 444 Days you can see just a very small part of the big research that I did for that project. It was to have two hostage-takers and two hostages in the movie who narrate the issue as in Rashomon.

Your film doesn’t pay attention to the how, it mainly asks why…

I have a lot of questions in my mind as a person who is of the second generation of the revolution, and the issue of the Embassy occupation which has influenced our lives is one of the main ones. I am not a political filmmaker and I am interested in art cinema and feature films. This is my only political movie. During the past thirty years, there has not been an Iranian film about hostage-taking except one feature about the Tabas event.

Jan Lambert, the former clerk of the US embassy in Iran, presents a good performance regarding your guidance, but the Iranian actors are not so talented in acting.

Exactly that is the point. Lambert and Bruse had a very good cooperation, they were so relaxed while shooting, and we

even had some shots of Bruse’s family. But Mr. Asgarzadeh, who planned the embassy occupation and Mrs. Ebtekar, the students’ speaker didn’t cooperate at all, so I was forced to take on a role myself. Mrs. Ebtekar just had an interview and I represented her exactly as she wanted, as a president.

You are not very conservative in your film, you are clearly taking sides and condemning the embassy occupation.

I think what I said is the majority’s opinion because most of the Iranian population is under the age of thirty. Those who belong to the first generation of the revolution like the movie, though only few of them have seen it. They criticized and asked why we didn’t have more people involved but the whole story was not interesting for me. It was important for me to express my own opinion too.

What do you think about the future of the relationship between Iran and the US? Mr. Ahmadi nejad is doing his best and I hope he will be successful. If in the coming election a reformist takes the office, we won’t have any relationship, but if he remains in office, maybe something will happen.

Kaveh Jalali

Into the Festival Carpets on Sale!

The international guests of the festival were treated to a trip to the impressive carpet museum.

We asked the filmmakers – who are visual thinkers after all – to tell us what was their favourite carpet, and why.

G

eorg Misch from Austria directed A Road to Mecca. He prefers this early twentieth century carpet from Kashan.

“I like it because it’s abstract and it doesn’t have too many floral patterns. And I found it interesting that the paisley motive has different meanings. It can be the Zoroastrian flame of life, the old seal of the king shaped like a fist, or the head of a parrot. I also like it because I have a very small apartment; this is the only carpet that would fit in there!”

Paivi Takala from Finland directed Learned by Heart. Her favourite carpet is the Mille Fleurs Prayer carpet made in Kerman in 1886.

“I thought I’d prefer one of the more geometrical patterns, but this one is my favourite, because it has something wild about it. In Europe, flowers are associated with femininity, but this one isn’t feminine at all. From a distance, you see this great shape, and when you come close, you see the beautiful textures.”

Takuro Kimura and his assistant Chieko Lioka from Japan directed Fragments of Depopulation. They chose this mid-twentieth century carpet form Isfahan.

“We both like this one best, because it has tigers and dragons and elegant lines. It’s very suited to Japanese tastes. And we like animals.”

… and we also met Richard Leacock, the festival special guest in the entrance of the carpet museum. He finds all of them very nice, but doesn’t have a favourite: “I don’t know anything about the carpets, I just walk on them.”

Work in progress The City in Iranian Films

One of the prime examples of these directors is Rakhshan Bani-E'temad, who employed such a vision in her later fiction films Under the Skin of the City and Mainline.

Under the Skin of the City depicts Tehran as a grey city, in both explicit and implicit terms, which leads the characters to a living hell. The same is reiterated in Mainline when the central character, a drug addict, cannot get rid of her habit while staying in Tehran. Shortly after leaving the city, she begins the process of healing and recovery.

The images of the busy and tense city are of course to be compared with the peaceful environment of northern Iran.

In the same vein, The Last Wednesday Fireworks by Asqar Farhadi also depicts the city as a symbol of agitation which provides ground for unpredictable forthcoming events.

With Song of Sparrows, Majid Majidi recently illustrated the immoralities of life in Tehran. The city is a strange place which cannot tolerate the simple and innocent main character of the film. Obviously, similar characters can be observed in numerous other Iranian films, such as the significant Killing Rabid, by Bahram Beizaei. Here the city always threatens the main female protagonist, while shadows of invasion and alienation dominate the film’s atmosphere.

Such visions are even more evident in documentary cinema, in which the city is the centre of unusual incidents. Documentaries by Mehrdad Oskouei, for instance Days without Calendar and Nose, feature urban people with numerous concerns and troubles. They reveal their inner feelings, thoughts, and contradictions. The works of directors such as Kaivan Ali-Mohammadi, Omid Bonakdar, Robert Safarian, and Pirouz Kalantari have looked upon the city differently; however none of them offer a positive view. Nonetheless, in his film, Tehran has no more Pomegranates, Mas'oud Bakhshi presents a different viewpoint on the subject. The film draws on Tehran with a satirical approach. People there have several contradictions which lead to humorous moments.

Those cities which are in the transitional stage from tradition to modernity transpose such images in cinema. It offers more often sadness than delight: people there tend to experience the modern world through their traditional ideas, which leads to lots of dramatic contradictions.

Ramtin Shahbazi – Translation: Ali Ameri

Tehran has no more Pomegranates

Throughout the history of Iranian cinema, urban life has always had a particular status. Migration from villages to the cities has rightly been interpreted as a significant cultural issue, and the city regarded as a symbol of power.

The village, symbol of rural life, always confronts the city, which exploits migrated peasants. For its incongruous architectural context and unsightly visual composition, the Iranian capital Tehran has been considered as a symbol of confusion, a perilous environment which always threatens human characters. Meanwhile, those Iranian directors who began their careers in documentary cinema offered a more harmonious composition in terms of narrative and theme.

Song of Sparrows

‘City’ is a word, and the image this word creates in the mind implies place and location. Actually in many feature films, city goes beyond a denotation. Posited in the corpus of a film, ‘city’ creates different meanings. In the film Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini, city is the symbol of a vulnerable and oppressed people, while in Sin City (Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez) it's a locale where sin is generated. Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese) observes the historical basis and origins of people.

On the other hand, films like The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci) or Sleepwalkers (Doug Aitken) illustrate city as a historical context for humans to go through experiences and to find their social definition.

Photo by Lasse Lecklin

Leila Kilani

Portrait

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n old woman, whose white hair is drawn into a bun, is no longer trying to find out why her husband disappeared.

“For more than thirty years I have felt like I have been suspended in the air. I don't know whether I am a married woman or a widow. My husband disappeared in 1972. He went out one day, on May 1st, and never came back.”

This is just the beginning of the fearful story Leila Kilani narrates in Our Forbidden Places, a documentary about the fate of the victims of the black years that tainted 43 years of Morocco’s history after the kingdom earned independence in 1956. For them the nightmare started just a few years later, when the Moroccan authorities resorted to torture and forced disappearances to silence all opposition movements and paralyzed the society with fear.

The subject of Our Forbidden Places is naturally connected to Kilani’s Moroccan background; “I grew up with the fear of all the Moroccans and the rumours around this subject: violence, missing people and torture”, she says.

Leila Kilani was born in 1970 in Casablanca. She studied economics in Paris, obtaining a Master’s Degree in Mediterranean history and civilization. After writing a thesis at ‘L´Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Social Sciences’ she started working as a freelance journalist in 1997. Two years later she turned to documentary cinema - apart from Forbidden Places her work includes Zad Moultaka - which is about candidates for immigration to Europe - and D’ici et d’ ailleurs, a documentary on the industrial memory in France.

The Moroccan director explains that she wants to use journalistic language and a research vocabulary in her films. About Forbidden Places she says: “I was naive but totally convinced that there was a film that had to be done about this subject – and that I could make it – so I just wrote the script and started.”

Our Forbidden Places tells a story about the secrets of people who were treated unjustly and have been kept silenced for a long time, sometimes to death. It’s the story of a victim’s life as a political opponent with an unclear destiny, as a result of the repression that started at the beginning of the 1960s, and worsened in the 70s and 80s with thousands of Moroccans illegally kept in police custody in secret detention centres. But it’s also the story of three generations of women: a grandmother, mother and daughter who live in the incertitude of having a missing family member.

The film is built on interviews and conversations, as Kilani tries to get as close as possible to those who are silent. She doesn’t stage anything but tries to give them the opportunity to tell their own story and get some sense of relief. Through the film she emphasizes the importance of the family as a unit and investigates the legacy of this political violence inside the family.

The yellow-scarved lady doesn’t want people to just have heroes, which can often be the result of violent political history. She wants people to raise questions about what actually can be done today, inside the victim’s families, with the taboos and with their lives. In Our forbidden Places nothing is black or white and every question leads to another question.

This film is the outcome of a young director’s efforts and love of documentary filmmaking. “Although I didn’t study filmmaking I felt the need to jump the line, try to do my own work and use the terrific language of cinema to make my point. I believe in documentary film we bet on the material, but in feature film maybe we bet on something else.”

Niloofar Zarei