Tahmineh milani filmography harrison
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Women’s Cinema in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Iranian women’s cinema is a theater of activism, audacity, and determination and women have played numerous important roles in cinematic production since its coming to Iran at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the role of women in cinema has been divided between pre-revolution and post-revolution. In the decades since the revolution, however, women have continued to till the landscape of Iranian cinema despite the considerable and varied social stigmas restricting their movements and activities. Indeed, in the face of these restrictions, the increase in the number of women engagerad in film and filmmaking in Iran has been staggering, with hundreds of movies in Iran having women behind the camera as well as in front of it, even with regulations and rules that restrict their presence and their visual portrayal on screen. From the beginning of the coming of cinema to Iran until today, over 120
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서울국제여성영화제
PROGRAM NOTE
A freelance reporter, Saira Shah, decides to visit an Afghan scholar in Tahman, the home town of her father and her family. Departing from an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan, Shah and her colleagues arrive at the last point, Tahman, via Kandahar, Kabul and Mexican. On the journey, Shah and her companions discover a RAWA street demonstration, public executions in a soccer field, women in their burqas forced to beg in Kabul, and a beauty salon, primary school and hospital which have no choice but to operate illegally. Then, going via Mexican, an area of tribespeople who oppose the Taliban, Shah reaches her family home town, Tahman. From his childhood her father remembered trees with fresh fruit and a fountain in a garden like Eden. However, she can not find either a garden or a human being-the war has left behind a bald and silent mountain alone in the transformed Tahman. A hidden camera and anamorphic lens lets the viewer watch the real lives of Afghans
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Dr Michael Abecassis
War Iranian Cinema: Between Reality and Fiction
The fascination for the Western world with Iranian cinema lies primarily with the fable-like developments of its stories which often plunge us into a world of exoticism and lured us with its singularity. Iranian war cinema born during the war between Iran and Irak is not as well distributed in Europe and films with English subtitles are difficult to get hold of. Whether it is interpreted as an anthropological document which opens a dialogue between the protagonist and the spectators, the ‘I’ and the other, Iranian war cinema by Tabrizi, Sinayi, Hatamikia and Ghobadi, among many others, can be seen as a spiritual voyage where the soul hovers between absence and presence. In the wake of war cinema, in general, one can draw parallels with mythology, Judeo-Christian tradition, literature and art. Its function is not only didactic but cathartic, and the particularity of Iranian war cinema like no other i