Image Credit: Film Images
If you had gone to see every single one of the acclaimed movies from Iran that have played in the U.S. since the mid-’90s — the lyrically subdued Abbas Kiarostami films, like Through the Olive Trees and Taste of Cherry, that were hailed at the time as minimalist masterpieces; the feminist political parable The Circle; scrappy fables like The White Balloon, Children of Heaven, and A Time for Drunken Horses; the enchantingly colorful woven rug of a movie Gabbeh — it would be perfectly reasonable for you to come away from that experience thinking that Iran is a land of people who live in the countryside and have simple, non-intellectual jobs, who don’t talk very much, and, what’s more, that their extreme verbal reticence expresses a kind of emotional simplicity as well. It was widely understood, and discussed in the press, that the holy quietude of Iranian cinema was, in part, a tactical way of getting around the watchful eye of the country’s theocratic regime, a method of delivering political statements almost literally between the lines. Nevertheless, going to an Iranian movie often made it feel as if you were going back in time, watching characters almost metaphysically removed from the roiling complexities of the contemporary world. READ FULL STORY »
