Iran: Beyond Fact and Fiction

Tony McKibbon looks at the cinema of a country that has made a unique contribution to contemporary filmmaking, and asks just what it is that makes Iran different.

'By their difference, Iranian films make us realize the extent to which 'cinema' has always been defined and controlled by European-American models deriving from
Western theatre, fiction, music, painting and so on.'

So says Godfrey Cheshire, in an article in Projections 8 on Abbas Kiarostami . To try and understand something about Iranian cinema's difference, it might be an idea, however paradoxical, to look first at one of its most conventional filmmakers, Majid (The Colour of Paradise) Majidi. Oscar nominated for his first film, The Children of Heaven, Majidi's recent Baran looks initially like an issue driven romance as we follow a good-looking young Iranian's infatuation with what turns out to be a young illegal Afghan girl masquerading as a boy at the same building site. The boy, Lateef, becomes increasingly fascinated by the girl's presence, and when she's forced off the job, he searches her out, and helps the family financially even when his largesse has the family returning to Afghanistan and consequently leaving the construction worker bereft. Most of the way Majidi's film plays on well-known tropes: the girl hiding under the guise of masculinity, the girl's hairpin serving a similar function to the slipper in Cinderella, the young man's increasing sensitivity to the subtleties of life as even a hint of green that suggests the girl's presence is enough to evoke feelings of yearning in the boy's mind and heart.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 93