FESTIVALS

Days of Iranian film

Days of Iranian film in the Tuškanac cinema, March 7-12, 2005, featured six films: Still Nature (Tabi’at-e bijan, 1974) by Sohrab Shahid Saless, Traveler from the South (Mosafere jonub, 1997) by Parviz Shahbazi, A Cloud and Sun (Abr-o aftab, 1997) by Mahmoud Kalari, The Birth of a Butterfly (Tavalod-e yek parvaneh, 1998) Mojtaba Raie, Tree of Life (Derakht-e-jan, 1998) by Farhad Mehrenfar and Virgin Mary (Maryam Moghadas) by Shahriar Bahrani.
Three of these six movies were »very typical« of Iranian cinema, one was a bit »atypical«, and only one was a disappointment. The oldest film screened Still Nature atypically leans on strong formalism, that was, in this case, unusually successfully linked with the demand for realism. A Cloud and the Sun, a typically Iranian film on the whole, has a simple story, represents an ambiental combination of tragicomic and lyrical, and primarily captures with moments of documentary directness. Tree of Life is some sort of poetic-lyric-ethnographic chronicle of the Nomad tribe inhabiting the Talesch mountains in the Iranian province of Gilan, and it could be described as a counterpart of a folk poem or naïve painting. Alongside these three very good to excellent works, figure Traveler from the South and The Birth of a Butterfly, whose neorealist spirit, or in other words, fairytale simplicity is characteristic of the Iranian cinema. Although they do not stand out in approach or style, they are quite viewable, while the only disappointment was the pompous film of religious thematic, Virgin Mary.

Janko Heidl