Category: Iranian Cinema
-
Banksy painting self-destructs after being sold at auction
Banksy has now become a household name, and that his work achieves strong prices at major auctions is no longer a curiosity or exception. When Sotheby’s announced that a final lot of their Contemporary Art Evening Auction on the Friday night of 2018 Frieze week in London would be a previously unseen version of Banksy’s…
-
Being Hassan for Morocco
A photographer, designer, and filmmaker, Hassan Hajjaj is one of Morocco’s preeminent international artists, sometimes called his native country’s answer to Andy Warhol. Entirely self-taught and influenced by a mix of London’s hip-hop and reggae scenes and his North African heritage, Hajjaj has a diverse practice that includes portraiture, installation, performance, fashion, and furniture design.…
-
Illusionist Painter
Rob Gonsalves is a 55-year-old Canadian of Portuguese descent who paints scenes that fill in the space somewhere in between everyday activities and hallucinations. His images contain dual representations of reality—with his particular artistry forming at the intersection between fantasy and nonfiction. At just 12 years old, Gonsalves began acquiring perspective drawing skills and giving…
-
Iranian Homosexuals in an Album
Born to Iranian parents but growing up with Swiss upbringing gave Laurence Rasti critical mind that has a flavors of both culture. In her project “There Are No Homosexuals in Iran “, we can see the alternative perspective that she brought to a social issue in Iran. “In Denizli, a small town in Turkey, hundreds of Iranian gay refugees have put…
-
A brief history of Iranian cinema
To best understand the roots of Iranian cinema, one must perhaps travel back to the early 20th century, when the Qajar monarch Mozaffareddin Shah was shown cinematographic footage during a visit to France. The cinematograph, invented in 1892, was the successor to the kinetoscope that granted viewers the ability to watch quality, illuminated images on…
-
The Loss of High Culture
This loss of high culture is not an American phenomenon alone. English intellectual and artistic life has fallen off greatly since the generation of Evelyn Waugh, Isaiah Berlin, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. England now appears to be Mick Jagger’s country. The English novel, as written by Martin Amis, Ian -McEwan, and Salman Rushdie, attracts more publicity…
-
A Film About Iranian Divorced Woman
Ida panahandeh’s first feature film ‘Nahid’ has been selected in Cannes Festival 2015 official selection. Nahid is a divorced woman who lives in a northern city of Iran. She has to choose between his son and his love but she does not want to face the dilemma which others have made to her. Nahid tries…
-
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Just imagine mixing Dracula wandering in London with the Middle Eastern vampire girl thatcovered with the Vail, hunting down the bad men. Then continue imagining a high contrast sort of the expressionist style of cinema with lots of weird but cool Iranian characters living in a nightmarish city surrounded with the oil wells… That is the…
-
The Surfer Girls Of Iran
The 28-year-old Irish surfer has spent several weeks in the past three years riding the waves in a remote region of what is – to Western minds – a little-understood state. In doing so, she has helped to break down cultural boundaries, and introduced Iranian women to a sport that was always waiting on their…
-
“Snow” A Good Film by Mehdi Rahmani
“Snow,” the new film by Mehdi Rhamani, is a gloomy film about a middle class family that, because of financial difficulties, is on the verge of disintegration. Although the subject is somehow repetitive, the film’s atmosphere is quite absorbing. The entire film happens in a rather large house that the family has to give up…
-
Iranian Living Room
Middle East has been the center of attention for the last decade or so not only by anthropologists or sociologists or even economists but by the ordinary people of all walks of life. This time the orientalisim is not organized curiosity of gathering the information for the old ways of colonialism, this time it is…
-
Forbidden Movie
After a long day at work, and to get away from it all, I decide to treat myself to a movie. Once I get there, and as I am getting off the cab, I see a crowd of religious fundamentalists, opposing the screening of the movie, with signs in their hands. I am used…
-
Iranian Casablanca
The return of Amir’s ex girlfriend, Nazli, now married to a Deutsch citizen, makes things more complicated, stirring up long withheld emotions, desires and memories. A bridge, between old and new, the past and the future, the tradition and the contemporary, values and desires, staying and leaving, keeping and letting go. A bridge to cross…
-
Unfit Iranian Men and a Movie Called NOTHING
In his film “Nothing,” Abdolreza Kahani expresses his disappointment in Iranian men in an angry tone. That is why he gives the final choice and decision to one of the film’s female characters. In the film’s last scene, we see that Efat, the family’s mother, is wearing her running shoes, an act that underscores her…
-
Iranian New Wave Cinema – Fat Shaker
The Fat Shaker, a movie written, produced and directed by Mohammad Shirvani, literally does what its title suggests: it shakes. Shirani’s intentional use of a digital handheld, and very shaky, camera, takes us on a roller coaster of highs and lows surrounding a morbidly obese father, Levon Haftvan, and his deaf, mute, son’s relationship. When…
-
At the End of 8th Street
With her brother on the death row for murder, Niloofar, Taraneh Alidoosti, has only three days, to come up with blood money, Diya, to be paid to the victim’s next of kin, or her brother will be executed. This is the main story around which a series of events take place in the movie, the…
-
Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly
The opening in Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly”, is reminiscent of Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies (2010): a playful group of friends turns out to be childish and overbearing, and their holiday arrangements entirely banal. The Camera dizzily following each person, as the vacationers arrive at the ramshackle beach house, mending broken windows and doors while…
