Director
Ziad Douieri

Country of Origin
Lebanon/Canada

Language
Arabic and French w/English subtitles

Year/Time
1999/105m

Presenter
W. Ben Adams, PhD candidate, NES/ Anthropology

September 02

WEST BEIRUT

Review from the Entertainment Weekly...

It's easy to see why Tarek (Rami Doueiri), the rascally teenage hero of West Beirut, walks around wearing a look of barely suppressed delight. It's 1975, and his city is being torn in two by a war he couldn't give less of a damn about. The battle has something to do with the Christians and the Muslims (you'd have no idea from the movie why they were ever in conflict), yet for Tarek, war, in a word, means freedom: no school, no responsibility, the right to wander the streets scarfing falafel and searching for a place to develop the Super-8 home-movie footage that he and his friend have shot of a local woman with big hair and a short skirt. (And you thought Westernization was all about McDonald's.)

Ziad Doueiri, the writer-director of West Beirut (as well as the lead actor's older brother), shares in his hero's delight. He understands the way that urban warfare could look like nothing so much as a vacation to a brazen adolescent with an instinct for troublemaking. Doueiri, after immigrating to the U.S., began his career working as a cameraman for Quentin Tarantino, but West Beirut feels closer in spirit to the Louis Malle of Murmur of the Heart. The film's most resonant pleasure is the thrill Doueiri takes in ripping the veil off of contemporary Arab life, viewing it as something funky and casual and cosmopolitan. West Beirut does meander a bit, yet it has a fractious, clear-eyed fusion of comedy, innocence, romance, and sudden danger, and, in its portayal of Tarek's parents (Joseph Bou Nassar and Carmen Lebbos), the film becomes a haunting testimonial to the fact that war in the Middle East isn't just a matter of ideology and death. War is also a peaceful, normal home with a Molotov cocktail tossed into the living room

location: ILC 130

Director
Majid Majidi

Country of Origin
Iran

Language
Persian w/English subtitles

Year/Time
1997/90m

Presenter
Parvaneh Hosseini, PhD candidate, Near Eastern Studies

October 07

CHILDREN OF HEAVEN

Review from the The New York Times...

The young hero of Majid Majidi's ''Children of Heaven'' is played by Mir Farrokh Hashemian, a desolate-looking boy with huge brown eyes and a way of sending tears suddenly rolling down his cheeks. Those tears well up with some regularity during this film about 9-year-old Ali, his younger sister Zahra (Bahareh Seddiqui) and their scheme for sharing a pair of his tattered sneakers. The children want to hide the fact that Zahra's shoes have been lost because this will be a hardship for their parents. The family's carefully detailed poverty, which reflects the filmmaker's own childhood experience, colors everything that happens in this story.

Events in the film are seen through the children's ingenuous eyes, as is so often and artfully the case in Iranian films. (A child's-eye view is, among other things, helpful in circumventing Government censors.) But in the more honest, less manipulative films that this one resembles -- especially the graceful work of Jafar Panahi (''The White Balloon,'' ''The Mirror'') -- what the young characters observe is liable to be more surprising than it is here. In ''Children of Heaven,'' life is sweet despite countless hardships, and no reality beyond the economic intrudes upon a fairy tale atmosphere. Only through heavy-handed emphasis does the quest for new sneakers take on any greater meaning.

In ''Children of Heaven,'' life in Teheran is documented in everyday detail, from the less desirable potatoes available to Ali's family to the way a woolen garment is carefully unraveled so it can be knitted into something else. Eking out a living is especially tough for a family of Turkish origin living in the southern part of the city, a neighborhood duly contrasted with a wealthy area in the north.

One of the film's most elaborate episodes finds Ali and his father (Amir Naji) undertaking a punishing bike ride so that the father can seek gardening work among Teheran's rich. It's typical of Mr. Majidi's reliance on the expected that this journey of hope ends in frustration. And that a lonely rich child materializes out of nowhere, eager to make Ali his instant best friend.

The film's two young stars are as guileless as possible, even when the film contrives to turn the shoe issue into its main dramatic focus. Ali and Zahra meet secretly in the middle of each school day to pass along the sneakers, but that proves to be no solution. Zahra is hampered by ill-fitting shoes at the rigorous girls' school that she attends. (The film is a production of Iran's Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, so all school scenes look beneficial and wholesome.) And Ali, against all odds, determines to run a long-distance race and win the third-place prize of running shoes for Zahra. Not since Rocky left the boxing ring has a sporting contest been filmed as momentously as this school race.

''Children of Heaven'' does provide a kindly, enveloping sense of Iranian life and customs, from the way the family prepares sugar cubes to be served at a mosque to the way Zahra helps care for elderly neighbors. These moments come more easily to Mr. Majidi than his studiously bittersweet ending for what is, despite its surface bleakness, an essentially sunny story.

location: ILC 130

Country of Origin
Iraq

Language
Kurdish w/English subtitles

Year/Time
2005/95m

Presenter
Matt Flannes, MA candidate, Near Eastern Studies

November 04

TURTLES CAN FLY

Review from the Washington Post...

Bahman Ghobadi's third narrative feature, after "A Time for Drunken Horses" and "Marooned in Iraq," is far and away the Iranian Kurdish filmmaker's best work -- and that's saying something. With the force of a boot to the stomach, "Turtles Can Fly" has the ability to render viewers not just speechless and breathless but in a kind of emotional free fall, in a way that his earlier work, stunning in its own right, only hinted at. It's a soaring achievement, without ever leaving the ground.

Set in a small, mountainous Kurdish village, during the days just before and just after the American invasion of Iraq, "Turtles" centers around the 13-year-old "Satellite" (Soran Ebrahim), so nicknamed for his expertise in hooking up the scavenged hardware necessary for TV reception. But that's not his only skill. Scooting around town on his tricked-out bicycle, and sporting a backwards baseball cap while spouting random English phrases, Satellite is also adept at arms trading and other forms of hustling, riding herd on a crew of juvenile mine sweepers who earn their dangerous living clearing the surrounding fields of live explosives, risking life and limb in exchange for a bit of cash.

Into this horrifying milieu, which writer-director Ghobadi captures with an unblinking gaze that manages to be both deadpan and darkly comic, comes a strange and impossibly sad family unit: the orphaned Agrin (Avaz Latif) -- a gorgeous, world-weary adolescent -- and her armless, possibly clairvoyant brother Hengov (Hiresh Feysal Rahman), whose skill at disarming undetonated mines with his teeth (yes, teeth ) more than hints at the source of his handicap. Traveling with them is a blind toddler, Riga (Abdol Rahman Karim), a boy who must be constantly kept on a leash so as not to wander into a minefield, pond or off a cliff, and yet who seems no more a burden to the saintly, long-suffering Hengov -- his brother? father? uncle? -- than Hengov's own physical impairment does.

Something about the child is eating at Agrin, though. Yet exactly what that is, and how it will ultimately affect these three tragic figures -- as well as the irrepressible Satellite, who has become smitten with the beautiful, depressive girl and who will eventually become caught up, physically and emotionally, in her fate -- will not be made clear until the film's end.

As he demonstrated with "Drunken Horses," Ghobadi has a gift for working with child actors, especially disabled ones, yet he exploits neither their infirmities nor their youth for our sympathy. There is a gravitas to Ghobadi's juvenile characters that, as with all classic tragedy heroes, moves us to experience both pity and fear for them. In the end, our catharsis comes like a thud, not in response to the fall of the mighty from on high but of the weak from their already low vantage point.

Turtles, of course, cannot fly (although one does seem to, very briefly, under Ghobadi's poetic camerawork). His film, on the other hand, takes to the air like a doomed but beautiful bird, tracing a flight, not of fancy, but of aching, poignant artlessness.

location: ILC 130

Director
Reha Erdem

Country of Origin
Turkey

Language
Turkish w/English subtitles

Year/Time
2006/111m

Presenter
Hikmet Kocamaner, PhD candidate, NES/ Anthropology

December 02

TIMES AND WINDS

Review from the New York Times...

Livestock far outnumber humans in “Times and Winds,” Reha Erdem’s transporting vision of life in a mountain village in northwest Turkey as seen through the eyes of three children on the verge of adolescence. Make no mistake: The movie, for all its majestic shots of the rocky landscape and of the moon skittering behind clouds, is not a lump-in-your-throat portrait of the noble poor living in harmony with the elements. Even in this remote hamlet untouched by television, human nature is what it is. The two boys, the best friends Omer (Ozkan Ozen) and Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), and one girl, Yildiz (Elit Iscan), whose day-to-day lives the movie observes with an affectionate detachment, giggle and point at the spectacle of animals mating.

Within their families there is an ugly heritage of generational strife. Because Omer’s strict, ailing father (Bulent Emin Yarar), the village imam, prefers Omer’s younger brother, Omer devoutly wishes his father dead.
While his parents are asleep, he steals into their room and opens a window over their bed, hoping the night air will aggravate his father’s severe respiratory problems. He surreptitiously pulls apart and empties the capsules prescribed for his father’s condition. He even traps a poisonous scorpion he intends to unleash on his father, but it dies.

There is a scene of a frustrated farmer beating a horse and another of an old man attacking his son for stealing nuts from a tree. Yildiz is treated like a servant by her mother. Yakup has a secret infatuation with the village teacher (Selma Ergec), a beautiful young woman whom the villagers reward with regular deliveries of milk and bread. The boy is crushed when he comes upon his father peeping at her through a window of her house. The scene of the son spying on the father spying on the woman rubs in the fact that this is no Garden of Eden. The teacher’s lessons about the Earth’s rotation, light, heat and the water cycle reflect the film’s focus on the intersection of daily life with the laws of nature. Its absence of high drama allows such primary forces to become its main subject. The film is organized around the five daily calls to Islamic prayer, chronologically reversed so that night is followed by evening, then afternoon, noon and dawn. As the sun rises at the end of the movie, this rearrangement of time simultaneously evokes the village’s unchanging way of life and the blind expectations of preadolescent children facing adulthood.

As in Iranian films that focus on childhood, the soundtrack of “Times and Winds” is filled with the stirrings of nature — the wind rushing through trees, animal sounds and bird song from near and far. Augmenting this pastoral symphony are excerpts from several pieces by Arvo Pärt (including the “Te Deum”) that add texture and gravity to the film. The music — lush but emotionally neutral and at times static — conjures eternal things.

For all its beauty, though, you couldn’t describe “Times and Winds” as uplifting, and its attitude toward childhood is not sentimental in the manner of similarly minimalist Iranian movies. Its vision of people in thrall to religious ritual and living at the mercy of nature may be poetic, but it is no idyll. The serpent has done its dirty work.

Click here to visit the film's website.

location: ILC 130