UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinéma
April 25 - May 16, 2015
Billy Wilder Theater
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| Leila Hatami in What's the Time in Your World? |
The UCLA Film Archive is pleased to once again explore the diverse currents of Iranian cinema with its annual series highlighting recent and classic films from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. In the wake of Asghar Farhadi’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar win for A Separation in 2011, the depth and breadth of Iranian cinema today continues to amaze even as the challenges faced by its filmmakers remain of concern. While established masters continue to make their unique voices heard, including writer-director Rakhshan Banietemad, whose award-winning Tales opens this year’s series, newer filmmakers continue to captivate. Farhadi’s influence can be felt in a number of outstanding, tightly-wound contemporary dramas by emerging directors (Melbourne, I’m Not Angry), while others are charting radically different paths visually and narratively (Fish & Cat, 316). It’s a heady mix that makes this a particularly fascinating moment to be surveying the landscape of this always invigorating national cinema. As in recent years, it is anticipated that some filmmakers will appear in person to discuss their work.
Saturday, April 25 at 7:30 PM
Co-writer-director Rakhshan Banietemad’s return to fiction filmmaking, greeted with the Best Screenplay award at Venice, is a tour-de-force portrait of a people and a society at the breaking point. In a series of interlocking short stories, Banietemad takes up the lives of characters from some of her previous films Gilenah (2005), The Blue-Veil (1995) to find them still struggling for some degree of personal freedom and dignity. The film’s pervading sense of despair makes it all the more poignant when some do manage to find it, even if in fleeting glimpses in the night.
Sunday, April 26 at 3:00 PM
I'm Not Angry! (!عصبانی نیستم) - Director: Reza Dormishian - 110 min
The title of director Reza Dormishian’s second feature echoes the prescribed mantra given to Navid (Mohammadzadeh) by his psychiatrist (along with antidepressants) to recite when events feel overwhelmed. For Navid, a university student expelled for political activity, however, his explosive rage has deeper sources. Jarring in tone and visually arresting, I’m Not Angry captures the seething frustrations of a generation with a blunt frankness that led to its being pulled from competition at the Fajr Film Festival.
Sunday, April 26 at 7:00 PM
Fish & Cat (ماهی و گربه) - Director: Shahram Mokri - 134 min
Selected for New Directors/New Films in 2014, Fish & Cat heralds the emergence of a fresh and original new voice in Iranian cinema. Shot entirely in a single, black and white bravura camera take, writer-director Shahram Mokri’s second feature plays mind-bending games with time and place while a pair of potential serial killer cannibals stalk a group of camping students at a lake. Thoroughly creepy, but never (really) gory, Fish & Cat reveals an absurdist, apocalyptic edge in the end that suggests more the influence of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, than American horror films.
Monday, April 27 at 7:30 PM
My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns
(من نگهدار جمالی وسترن میسازم) - Director: Kamran Heidari - 65 min
Utterly unexpected and thoroughly charming, director Kamran Heidari’s debut documentary about an amateur filmmaker in southwestern Iran explodes preconceived notions and illuminates the universal power of popular culture. Since he was a teen, Negahdar Jamali has obsessively made low-budget westerns modeled on his idols John Ford and Sergio Leone in the arid plains surrounding his hometown of Shiraz. Ignored by the official film ministry and harangued by his long-suffering wife, Jamali perseveres with a dreamer’s passion.
Friday, May 1 at 7:30 PM
Today (امروز) - Director: Reza Mirkarimi - 88 min
Iran’s official submission for Oscar consideration this year, writer-director Reza Mirkarimi’s tense, powerful drama unfolds over a single day in a hospital maternity ward after a taciturn cab driver allows himself to be drawn into the personal crisis of a distraught woman who jumps into his backseat. Mirkarimi keeps his character’s true motivations obscured at every turn as circumstances shift, suspicions mount and the hypocrisy of certain social and cultural taboos are exposed.
Saturday, May 2 at 7:30 PM
Red Carpet (رد کارپت) - Director: Reza Attaran - 80 min
One of Iran’s most famous comedians, Reza Attaran takes on Hollywood and the international media in this, ultimately, gentle satire set against the real glitz of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Attaran himself plays a naive, struggling actor who journeys from Tehran to film’s annual epicenter to get his screenplay to Steven Spielberg. While the film is shot in the style of Borat (2006)—sans the crassness—Attaran’s escalating comic provocations render him more like a Persian Rupert Pupkin.
Wednesday, May 6 at 7:30 PM
What's the Time in Your World? (در دنیای تو ساعت چند است؟) - Director: Safi Yazdanian - 101 min
Leila Hatami stars as Goli, a woman who returns to her hometown after decades living abroad to find a strange amnesia clouding her memory. She is met at the airport by Farhad (Ali Mosaffa), a mysterious local merchant she does not know, but who seems to know everything about her. He becomes her empathetic guide to the transformed town as well as her own past leading her on a journey of self-discovery suffused with romantic melancholy.
Friday, May 8 at 7:30 PM
Red Rose (گل سرخ) - Director: Sepideh Farsi - 87 min
Paris-based writer-director Sepideh Farsi ingeniously employs a single setting to dramatize the vicissitudes of political idealism in intimate and deeply personal ways. As the Green Revolution explodes around him, Ali, a damaged veteran of protests decades ago, holes up in his apartment but events come to him when a young woman seeks shelter from the police. He lets her in and, over the days and weeks of unrest to come, they start an intense, dangerous, high-wire relationship that challenges them both in unpredictable ways.
Sunday, May 10 at 7:00 PM
316 (۳۱۶) - Director: Payman Haghani - 72 min
Just as Amelie (2001) assumed its heroine’s unique perspective to speak to the general nature of France and Frenchness, writer-director Payman Haghani (A Man Who Ate His Cherries) reflects on recent Iranian experience through one woman’s singular passion for shoes. As she recalls her life in voiceover, from a childhood interrupted by revolution and war, through adulthood, motherhood and old age, Haghani fills the screen with playful, inventive, striking images framed entirely around people’s footwear. The result is as beguiling as it is moving.
Preceded by Pink Nail Polish (لهستانی ناخن صورتی) - Director: Zhinous Pedram - 6 min
Slowly, cautiously, with a mounting anticipation, a young girl makes her way out into world in director Zhinous Pedram’s lovely, beautifully shot paean to the adventure of girlhood.
Friday, May 15 at 7:30 PM
Melbourne (ملبورن) - Director: Nima Javidi - 91 min
Writer-director Nima Javidi’s remarkable debut feature opens as a young couple in Tehran prepares for an imminent trip abroad. A patient accumulation of familiar detail—the hurried list checking, the small annoyances of packing—hints at their hopeful expectations for the future, which would seem to include the baby sleeping in their back bedroom. Then everything turns upside down. Before we know it, Javidi plunges us into one the most nerve-wracking, nail-biting, what-would-you-do ethical thrillers in recent memory. It’s a ride you don’t want to miss.
Saturday, May 16 at 7:30 PM - Double Feature
Still Life (1974, طبیعت بیجان) - Director: Sohrab Shahid Saless - 93 min
Winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1974, Still Life and its “translucent realism,” in the words of scholar Hamid Dabashi, confirmed Sohrab Shahid Saless as a “leading visionary of his generation.” Saless’ measured pacing and long takes transform the story of an elderly attendant of an isolated railroad crossing who is forced to retire into a powerful meditation on the larger forces—modernity, tradition culture—that shape the everyday.
Mohsen Badie: Artisan of Cinéma (2009, محسن بدیع صنعتگر سینما) - Director: Aziz Saati - 45 min
This heartfelt tribute pays homage to Iranian cinema pioneer Mohsen Badie, founder of what Hamid Naficy described as “perhaps the best film lab in Iran.” Badie’s sons, who took over the lab, and filmmakers such as Bahman Farmanara, recount Badie’s significant contributions to such landmark productions as A Party in Hell (1958), Prince Ehtejab (1974) and Still Life (1974), as well as his own important work as producer, director and cinematographer.
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