The May Lady (1999)

The May Lady is about the tribulations of a 42-year­old divorcee caught between motherhood and womanhood in a society where values are constantly changing. The protago­nist, Forough Kia, is a filmmaker assigned to make a TV documentary on the subject of the perfect Iranian mother. Her name sets the tone of the story: it brings to mind Forough Farrokzhad, a pioneer filmmaker and a talented poet, some thing of an Iranian Sylvia Plath and a voice for intellectual Iranian women. The family name Kia evokes homage to Abbas Kiarostami whose films carry a documentary quality.

Forough is a well-educated urban middle-class woman who tries to find her own space between the demands of her lover and the possessive tendencies of her young son. The woman in her yearns for an adult relationship, but such feelings are not well received by her seemingly modern son, who assumes the tradi­tional role of the male head of the family, responsible for protect­ing the female regardless of her age or status.

We watch Forough and her son Mani go through their daily routines. She is cooking or cleaning nonchalantly while arranging business affairs on the cordless telephone. He is being a typical adolescent, but perhaps not so typical for Iran as we imagine it in the West. This modern boy in blue jeans hangs out with peers and listens to loud rock music in his room, which is decorated not very differently from the room of any middle-class adolescent in the West. He even attends a Western-style party. However, he is arrested for his transgres­sion and a patronizing magistrate blames the mother and her divorced status for lack of parental discipline.

The May Lady portrays the life of an intelligent modern woman, a theme which had not been examined so realistically in Iranian cinema before. Forough’s interstitial state does not allow her to have a balanced relationship with her son or with her lover. She confides to a friend that a middle-aged woman and a mother cannot speak of love so easily. To declare that she wants to live with the man she loves would entail forgoing the honor of motherhood. In a period of transition from tradition to modernity, the burden is more deeply felt by the women of her social background and status.

In this film, Bani-Etemad (director) effectively solves the prob­lem of the ambivalence created by restrictions imposed on sexual situations in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema by eliminating the male lover totally from the screen space. To display a more natural relationship, she presents him as a voice on the answering machine or a presence in poetic letters. The most commendable aspects of the film are the poetic undertones and the intimate quality of the protagonist’s inner monologues.

The opening sequences of the film are significant when we see only half of the face of a woman; the other half is cut by the frame. Later in Forough’s bedroom, audience attention is drawn to her photo hanging over the bed; there is a shadow on one side of the face. Is the visible half, the half she shows to the outside world and society, a perfect career woman and a perfect mother, repressing her feelings as a woman? Or is this the half that her son and hence the society are ready to see and accept? Bani Etemad told me during our discussion that the other half, which is not seen, is not limited to personal love. Rather, it is about things she cannot talk about.

The image of a woman with half her face in the dark may also represent the image of women in Iranian cinema, the image that the Islamic Republic has decided to put inside the frame, an image that negates feelings and sexuality and forces women to have a dual character, public and private.

If the film has a weakness, it is in its overall message, which again could be attributed to certain restrictions imposed on filmmakers or to self-censorship. First, there is a tendency to suggest that the tribulations women face are the same no matter where. This is questionable considering the repressive regime of Islamic Iran. Second, the film shows that all evils that fall on the heads of women come from men. Men beat their wives and throw them out, men run away and leave mothers to shoulder the responsibility of bringing up children on their own, men blame women for not being perfect mothers. In one of the clips from the documentaries of the protagonist, the daughter of the former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani retorts, ‘In our country, the problem is the law . . . All judges are men, who don’t understand the problems of women.’ It is rather simplistic to blame men rather than looking for the roots of evil in the patriarchal system itself. Third, the woman/artist is depicted as a mediator of discordant elements, the balancing force between adverse forces of society. When the son has a row with the militants of the Ansar E-Hizbollah (the followers of the Party of God), his mother, the woman/artist, reconciles the two opposing forces — modernism and fundamentalism — by preaching tolerance and compromise. It is fine to offer flowers instead of guns as in A Moment of Innocence, a film by another distinguished Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, but the concept is rather romantic for Iran’s present reality – Gönül Dönmez-Colin

Cast and Production Credits

Year - 1999, Genre – Drama, Country -Iran, Language – Persian, Director – Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Cast – Golah Adineh, Minoo Farshchi, Mani Kasraian, Baran Kosari, Atefeh Razavi

About Elly (2009)

TEHRAN — Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly” stands on top with eight nominations in the fourteenth edition of the Iran Cinema Celebration awards, announced the secretary of the event in a press release on Tuesday (Aug 24th, 2010).

“About Elly”, which won Farhadi a Silver Bear for best director at the Berlinale 2009, has been nominated in the different categories of best director, best screenplay, best actress, best actor and four others.

Starring Shahab Hosseini, Golshifteh Farahani, Mani Haqiqi, Saber Abar and Merila Zarei, “About Elly” tells the story of middle class Iranians whose trip to the Caspian Sea turns into a disaster as they try to maintain their social customs.

A jury comprising over 60 Iranian cineastes has completed its selection of nominations for the event, said festival secretary Farhad Tohidi.

The annually held celebration is sponsored by Iran’s House of Cinema. However, the 13th edition took place without having a winner or an award ceremony.

The following is the list of nominees for awards in the 14th edition of the celebration:

Best Director:

Varuj Karim-Masihi “Hesitation”. Asghar Farhadi “About Elly”. Dariush Mehrjuii “Santuri”. Bahram Beizaii “When All of Us Are Asleep”.

Best Screenplay:

“About Elly” Asghar Farhadi. “Fire Keeper” Mohsen Amiryusefi. “Gold and Copper” Hamed Mohammadi. “Please Don’t Disturb” Mohsen Abdolvahhab.

Best Actress:

Golshifteh Farahani “About Elly”. Leila Hatami “Walking in Fog”. Hanieh Tavassoli “Evening of the 10th Day”. Hedyeh Tehrani “Seven Minutes to Autumn”. Negar Javaherian “Gold and Copper”.

Best Supporting Actress:

Merila Zarei “About Elly”. Rana Azadivar “About Elly”. Sareh Bayat “Imitator of Satan”. Sahar Dowlatshahi “Gold and Copper”. Jaleh Sameti “Hieran”

Best Actor:

Shahab Hosseini “About Elly” and “Walking in Fog”. Hamid Farrokhnejad “Fire Keeper” and “In the Color of Purple”. Mohammadreza Forutan “The Other”. Mehdi Hashemi “Nothing”. Hamed Behdad “Seven Minutes to Autumn”.

Best Supporting Actor:

Mehran Ahmadi “Nothing” and “Twenty”. Mohsen Tanabandeh “A Testimonial for God”. Babak Hamidian “Penniless”. Saber Abar “About Elly”.

Children of Heaven (1997)

One of the most successful Ira­nian films in the West, Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. It opens with eight-year-old Ali losing his younger sister Zahra’s newly repaired shoes. To avoid admitting this loss to his father, Ali and Zahra share a pair of sneakers, and much of the film revolves around their at­tempts to manage their exchange without being late for school.

The importance of shoes is emphasized when hundreds are depicted lined up outside a mosque, where the children’s father works serving tea, while their owners pray inside. Scenes in which the camera often focuses on the feet of the children running through the often cramped streets of poor, southern Tehran strikingly contrast a sequence set in the upscale, northern part of the city, where Ali proves much more capable than his father of communicating with the wealthy, coming to entertain a privileged boy while his father sprays trees in a spa­cious garden.

Finally, Ali enters a race in which third prize is a pair of shoes, but ends up disappointed when he comes in first. Children of Heaven is a melodrama, and Majidi uses slow-motion and emotive music, among other devices, to ensure audience empathy with his young characters. The film’s English title substitutes “Heaven” for “Sky,” a more literal translation from the Persian.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1997, Genre – Drama, Country – Iran, Language – Persian, Producer – Amir Esfandiari, Director – Majid Majidi, Music Director – Keivan Jahanshahi, Cast - Mohammad Amir Naji ,Mir Farrokh Hashemian, Bahareh Sedighi, Nafiseh Jafar Mohammadi ,Fereshteh Sarabandi ,Kamal Mirkarimi, Behzad Rafi ,Dariush Mokhtari ,Mohammad Hassan Hosseinian ,Masumeh Dalir, Zahra Mezani ,Kazem Asgharpour ,Mohammad Hossein Shahedi, Seyyed Ali Hosseini