Iranian pictures

If I was a person of means, I would put on an Iranian film festival. If I had a lot of means, I might take the festival on the road. It’s important to see people, and it’s important to show people. Among the films I would screen would certainly be Maryam Shahriar’s Daughters of the Sun.

spare, grim, desolate, labor, gender, iran, poverty,

These are my tags. They say about as much as I feel qualified to announce. What they mean is at least what you see on the screen. The desert distance where birds cry and cattle low measures the space between close shots of hands and faces, and the length to be traversed, if at all, to close the chasm between people in an intolerable situation.

You can marry the old man. You can marry a cousin. Love means I don’t know. In the meantime there is work, imprisonment, and gender obfuscation. There is the too late of government workers, multiple suicides, and the ramble of a rug-bearing ass.

Not a lot is written about it online. (Two notable exceptions are from my film club comrades Raccoon, and Unscrambled.) The film is paced like it’s shot: slow. There is no facile uplift. No celebration of Amanagol’s strength, as the Netflix blurb fatuously asserts. Dave Kehr calls the film obvious and enigmatic. But what exactly is so obvious?

Is it suffering? Does suffering mean what words cannot say? If so, we might question our impotence, but not Shahriar’s film.