I don’t know why it’s taken three years for Samira Makhmalbaf’s second feature to reach Chicago. It was finished in 1999 and won the jury prize at Cannes the following year. The Iranian director was only 17 when she finished her remarkable first feature, The Apple, which also screened in competition at Cannes and made her one of the youngest directors ever to gain an international reputation. Since then, she has made the 11-minute “God, Construction and Destruction,” about the responses of Afghan refugee children in Iran to the attacks on the World Trade Center, which is part of the 2002 international episodic feature 11/09/01 (still unscreened in the U.S.). She has also made the feature At Five in the Afternoon, about a young woman in post-Taliban Afghanistan, which is expected to premiere at Cannes in May.
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Makhmalbaf Film House—the eccentric Iranian film school founded by Mohsen in 1996 with a student body consisting of eight family members and friends—has already yielded several notable films, most recently The Day I Became a Woman (2000), directed by Marziyeh Meshkini, Mohsen’s second wife. Mohsen is both a former fundamentalist and a national hero, which gives a special edge to his school’s utopian agenda.
It can also be difficult to sort out fact from legend when it comes to westerns. The ambiguity in Blackboards relates to recent history, but both it and Wagon Master are intended to appeal to our mythic imaginations. Part of the rough parallel I find between them can be seen in critic and filmmaker Lindsay Anderson’s description of Wagon Master: “Ford often abandons his narrative completely, to dwell on the wide and airy vistas, on riders and wagons overcoming the most formidable natural obstacles, on bowed and weary figures stumbling persistently through the dust.” None of the figures in either film is on a religious pilgrimage, but in both, persecuted minorities—Mormons in Wagon Master, Kurds in Blackboards—flee across a wilderness toward some hope of a promised land, which gives their journeys religious overtones. In Blackboards the teachers can be seen as semireligious figures—rather like clergymen in search of congregations—and the old men call to mind a lost tribe, though the young smugglers come across like members of some downtrodden gang.
Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf
Written by Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf
With Bahman Ghobadi, Said Mohamadi, and Behnaz Jafari.
