My Experience at the 2013 Jerusalem Film Festival

Last week I attended the Jerusalem Film Festival and was introduced to the work of exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The Festival paid tribute to Makhmalbaf by showing three of his films, Salaam Cinema (1995), Gabbeh (1996), and his latest film, The Gardener (2012). He was present for two of the screenings and participated in Q & As, sharing his influences and motivations behind the films. I was deeply impacted by his work, especially by the film Gabbeh, about an Iranian nomadic tribe of carpet weavers. One of his goals for Gabbeh was to make a film rich in color when, at the time of the Islamic Revolution, black was predominant in Iran. He uses the vivid colors of the carpets, tribal dress, and landscape to achieve this. In Makhmalbaf’s words, his “film was trying to give hope and life to our [Iranian] society.” In addition, the film is lyrical in that it weaves in the poetry of Hafez and Rumi. All of his films are a combination of documentary and narrative, and he uses ordinary people as actors because they have “fresh life in their face[s].”

Iranian Filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf with former Program Director of the the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Richard Pena

Makhmalbaf’s films expose the Islamic Republic and give the message of peace, friendship and human dignity through art. In Salaam Cinema, he shows the 5000 Iranians who responded to Makhmalbaf’s call for actors for this film marking the 100^th anniversary of film. This highlighted the everyday Iranian’s desire to act in spite of the regime’s strict codes of modesty for dress and public behavior. Makhmalbaf spoke about the hypocrisy of Iranian society today: there is the real face and the outside face, the face inside the home and the face outside the home. In The Gardener, Makhmalbaf exposes the persecution in Iran of the 700,000 members of the Bahai faith and advocates for peace between different religions. 

What were my take-aways from my exposure to Makhmalbaf’s work, specifically Gabbeh? I’d like to imbue my Iran documentary with a more poetic and lyrical quality through the inclusion of Hafez poetry that has been important to the Mizrahi family, the subjects of my film. Hafez’s poem, “The Pearl that Slipped Its Shell,” is one such example where imagery can symbolize the Iranian Jewish community’s exile and lingering connection to Iran. The Persian carpet is another important cultural element to explore and weave in, to help depict Kerman, the city featured in my film known for its carpets. Finally, the contrast of the black of the Revolution and the colorfulness of my characters’ lives today is another possible element to incorporate.

A fascinating experimental film that I saw was Leviathan, by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, which offered a visceral look at the hard life of North Atlantic deep sea fishermen.  Absent of dialogue with the exception of a few words spoken by the crew, the film is a compilation of unique angles capturing the perspectives of the caught fish flopping around on deck, the fisherman as he hoists the heavy nets out of the water, the boat as it crashes through the sea, the synchronized rhythm of the fishermen cleaning fish or shucking scallops.  The eerie film score that accompanies the visuals gives the movie a haunting quality, which reinforces the persistent threat of a life at sea. 

I also saw the film Life Sentences by Nurit Kedar and Yaron Shani, the story of the inner turmoil and conflict in the son of a Jewish mother and Arab father who turned out to be behind dozens of terror attacks in Israel in the late 60s. After this is discovered, the mother flees the country with her kids and settles in Montreal’s orthodox Jewish community. The filmmakers successfully elicit the emotion of the son, now a grown man, who has struggled all his life to define his identity as either Arab or Jew.  To allow the main character—who has gone by different names in his lifetime—to tell his story, the filmmakers give him tremendous breadth and space, thereby eliciting his pain and suffering. 

Overall, my experience at the Festival was enriching, but the highlight was the exposure to Makhmalbaf and his work, which left me with the desire to see more of his films and learn more about his style of filmmaking.