I For Iran (Movie Review)

Transcription

1 50' 16/9 COUL OV PERSAN SUB FR/ENG A film by Sanaz Azari PRESS KIT Production: CVB - Centre Vidéo de Bruxelles Coproduction: RTBF - Télévision belge, CBA - Centre de l'audiovisuel à Bruxelles With the support : Centre du cinéma et de l'audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, de VOO (TV-NET-TEL), de la Commission Communautaire française, Beursschouwburg Brussels Le CVB est subventionné par la Commission Communautaire française et la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles et soutenu par la Loterie Nationale I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 1

2 FESTIVALS AWARDS - SCREENINGS FESTIVALS - AWARDS > FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE CINÉMA FID - MARSEILLE FRANCE 07/14 SPÉCIAL MENTION - Georges De Beauregard International prize - International competition > 8ème KAUNAS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL KAUNAS - ESTONIA 09/14 > 29ème FIFF NAMUR - BELGIUM 10/14 > CINEMAS DU GRUTI CINE CLUB PERSAN GENEVA - SWITZERLAND 10/14 > 14ème ESCALES DOCUMENTAIRES - LA ROCHELLE - FRANCE 11/14 > 24ème TRACES DE VIE - CLERMONT-FERRAND - FRANCE 11/14 > 34ème FESTIVAL D'AMIENS - FRANCE 11/14 > 55ème FESTIVAL DE POPOLI - ITALIE 11/14 BROADCAST > RTBF BELGIUM - JULY 2014 SCREENINGS > SACD-SCAM BELGIQUE - MAISON DES AUTEURS - BRUSSELS BELGIUM - 09/14 > ISELP (Institut Supérieur pour l'etude du Langage Plastique) BRUSSELS - BELGIUM 10/14 > DOCUMENTAIRES SUR GRAND ECRAN PARIS FRANCE -26/01/15 I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 2

3 Table of contents FESTIVALS AWARDS - SCREENINGS...2 SYNOPSIS...4 TECHNICAL SHEET...5 BIOFILMOGRAPHY...6 ARTICLE...7 INTERVIEW...8 PRODUCTION...10 COPRODUCTIONS...10 CONTACT...10 I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 3

4 SYNOPSIS Brussels, behind the closed doors of a classroom. Using a textbook dating from the Islamic revolution, Sanaz Azari, the director, learns how to read and write in Persian, her mother tongue. Over the course of the lessons, the teacher initiates her to the basics of the language, which becomes a gateway to the history and culture of Iran. Gradually, the didactic method of the lessons evolves into a poetic, visual collage, which introduces the notion of freedom and questions the meaning of a revolution. I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 4

5 TECHNICAL SHEET 50' 16/9 COUL OV PERSAN SUB FR / ENG Script and director: Sanaz Azari With: Behrouz Majidi Dop:Vincent Pinckaers Sound: Frédéric Meert - Matthieu Roche Editing: Effi Weiss Sound Editing: Maxime Coton Sound Mixing: Laurent Martin (Empire Digital) Genéric Amir Borenstein Calibration: Miléna Trivier Production manager: Olivier Burlet - Maud Girault Producer: Cyril Bibas (CVB) Production Centre Vidéo de Bruxelles - CVB - Michel Steyaert Coproduction RTBF Télévision belge - Wilbur Leguebe CBA - Centre de l'audiovisuel à Bruxelles - Javier Packer- Comyn Promotion: Centre Vidéo de Bruxelles - CVB Philippe Cotte philippe.cotte@cvb-videp.be (0) Vimeo link - DVD press kit stills screeners With de suppport : Centre du Cinéma et de l'audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles - VOO (TV-NET-TEL) de la Région Bruxelles-Capitale et la Commission communautaire française (Cocof) - Beursschouwburg Brussels - Helena Kritis I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 5

6 BIOFILMOGRAPHY Sanaz Azari was born in Ispahan (Iran) in She grew up and lives in Brussels where, after studying photography, she graduated from the scenography workshop at the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels de la Cambre (National School of Visual Arts). Parallel to her studies, she did three years of intensive theatre training in the Stanislavski method. In 2010, after various creating works in scenography, urban installations and exhibitions, she made her first documentary entitled: Salaam Isfahan. Salaam Isfahan Documentary - 59 min Prod: Entre chien et loup - Visions du Réel Festival (Switzerland) - Audience Award from the City of Nyon - Doc House festival Beursschouwburg - Brussels (Belgium) - 24th edition of the International Festival of French-speaking Films Acadia (Canada) - Special Mention - International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival - Glasgow (UK) - TIDF International Competition at the 7th Taiwan International Festival (Taiwan) - Elles tournent Festival - Brussels (Belgium) - The Villa de Leyva International Independent Film Festival in Bogota (Colombia) - Les hivernales du documentaire Festival (France) - Traces de vies Festival - Clermont-Ferrand (France) - Les écrans documentaires Festival - Gentilly (France) - Turin Festival, selected for the competition (Italy) - Escales documentaires Festival La Rochelle (France) - Award from Escales Documentaires Festival Corsica.Doc (France) - Awarded the Corsica.Doc Prize and the Young Audience Prize I comme Iran (I For Iran) Documentary - 50 min Prod:CVB Centre Vidéo de Bruxelles I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 6

7 ARTICLE LAURENT DE SUTTER * A man stands in front of a black board. A middle-aged man, curls of long grey hair fringing his bald spot, with a penetrating gaze the gaze of someone who has seen things, experienced things, knows things. He speaks a strange language, a language spinning like a dancing dervish. He speaks it with the slightly solemn delight of a teacher. Indeed, he is a teacher and he is teaching a young woman, of whom we see nothing but the hands and hear nothing but the voice, reading and writing Persian. The language is her mother tongue, though she can neither read nor write it. He teaches her using an object he is not in the habit of using, an object that troubles him: an old manual, dating from the period before the Iranian Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power in The pages of the manual are falling apart and, like all manuals of this sort, it tries to deconstruct the world around it into elementary syllables and naïve illustrations. The teacher explains to the young woman how to trace the letters, syllables and words, and she applies herself to learning them, getting her hand to know them, as she listens to the teacher s words. He cannot help drifting towards what the letters say about the present, about the past, and about the Revolution. For a manual is never just a manual: it is the embodiment of a point of view, the depository of the power that this point of view wishes to impose on those forced to follow its teaching; it is what charges the language with this power. To show this charge, a radical set up is required, that is to say that the image must show only this manual and the black board, and the respective words of the teacher and the pupil. One must become the pupil in order to be able to hear, in the movement of the teacher s words as he deciphers the discreet orders of the manual, the unfolding of its most unexpected meanings let s say: its ideological truth. Sanaz Azari s film, I For Iran, is thus a ruthless film, a film that shows only the flat surface of the black board on which the teacher traces chalk letters, and the flat surface of the manual and the illustrations contained within it. Between the two, there is also the flat surface of the notebook in which the young woman writes her lessons. And then there are bad quality images, taken from the Internet, which cause interference with the succession of flat surfaces. I For Iran is a film with no depth of field, because the black board and the manual provide all the depth that is available for the truth deployed in the teaching, here and now, of the Persian language: the depth of that which is clogged. The teacher lived through the Revolution and was an activist for it, but no longer believes in it. The young woman did not live through the Revolution and doesn t have much experience of her country, though, without saying as much, she still believes in it as witnessed by the simple act of taking the language into her body. In a way, I For Iran is a film without perspective, without the naivety that would be involved in offering perspectives, suggesting lines of convergence, designating, in the distance, a point that could at last redeem the contemporary condition of the children of Iran. But because it is without perspective, and because it gives what it has to give solely in the space separating a black board from a classroom, Sanaz Azari s film suggests much more: it suggests a slide, a radical irreconciliation between images and words, a gap whose power of suggestion exceeds that of any programme, be it political or aesthetic. Perhaps one could even say that I For Iran is a film about the irreconciliation at the heart of any language, which also lies at the heart of any image and at the heart of the relationship between any image and the spoken. But this irreconciliation has nothing dreadful or tragic about it. On the contrary, I For Iran is a film whose radicalism lies above all in its delicacy, the delicacy of the sounds of the Persian language, the delicacy of the outdated illustrations, the delicacy of the poetry of Hafez or Forough, the delicacy of the hand of the young woman and her softly hoarse voice, the delicacy of the gaps that Sanaz Azari introduces between the words, the sounds, the images and the spaces. It is a film about the delicacy resisting all tyrannies, about fragile images resisting all censorship and, against the stupidity and violence of the latter, it plays off the ineffable softness of memory, meditation and the intelligence of words when, as here, they manage to be shown. * Laurent de Sutter theorist, critic and editor. His latest books are: «Théorie du trou. Cinq méditations métaphysiques sur «Une sale histoire» de Jean Eustache» (Léo Scheer, 2013), «Métaphysique de la putain» (Léo Scheer, 2014). He directs the collection «Perspectives Critiques» for Presses Universitaires de France, and the collection «Critical Edge» for Polity Press. I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 7

8 INTERVIEW CÉLINE GUÉNOT - CATALOGUE FID - MARSEILLE JULY 2014 How can one talk about Iran today? How can you do it when you left Iran as a child and the Persian language is now completely foreign to you? Sanaz Azari answers these questions with somewhat philosophical simplicity. In a classroom somewhere in Belgium, she is learning how to read and write in her mother tongue. There is a textbook from the time of the Islamic revolution on her desk. In front of her, there is a black board, on which the teacher, a grey-haired Iranian, exiled as well, carefully traces words and sentences which are far from trivial. Dad doesn t give bread, because there is no work is written on the board. Out of these words deciphered with much effort, and these images stuck in time, something much wider appears. This is the method Sanaz Azari has chosen, in all modesty, in order to address the revolution. The choice of a subjective camera puts us right next to her, as pupils, watchful of the tiniest details, all ears to what the teacher has to say about the 1979 events or the good wine from Shiraz. His intimate relationship with Iran, his remorse and nostalgia contrast with the hesitations, the laborious perseverance and the distant memories of the director, who tries to make her way towards a country she doesn t really know. Her path is difficult and tortuous, just like the path of the revolution itself, but in this case the mouse might labour and bring forth a mountain. Céline Guénot : The whole set-up looks very simple: a classroom, a large blackboard, and facing you, a teacher, with plenty of room between you. Why did you choose to keep yourself in the background? Sanaz Azari : My self-effacement is the result of the cinematic layout I put in place. The moment I gave that central position to my teacher - a bit like placing him on a theatre stage, I suppose - a natural distance was created between him and me. It was the scenography of the place, so to speak, and the physical distance between us, that naturally imposed a certain removal on my part. When the camera zoomed in and I told my teacher, Go ahead, it s filming, he began the lesson we had prepared beforehand, and at those moments it was very difficult for me to intervene. Without consciously realising it, I found myself in the same situation as a student who has to listen to the teacher without too many interruptions. It was in the editing stage that I began to express myself, to answer my teacher, to find the freedom and impertinence that I had lost during the lessons or during the filming behind these closed doors that I had set up. With the voice-overs, I created a new space in the film where my voice, combined with images from the textbook, tells a new story of which I am the author. It s via those sorts of cinematic tricks that I can be reincarnated, whilst the student in the background becomes the author of her own film. C.G.: How did you get to meet this teacher? How much is scripted and how much is improvised in his lesson? S.A. :The idea for the film came about when I had already started taking Persian lessons. The idea for the film in fact arose after I dhad only a few lessons. I said to myself that someone teaching the Persian language today cannot ignore the fascinating link that exists between a language and its culture, its writings and its politics. After the first few lessons, where I had just learnt the first letters of the alphabet, I decided to stop so that I could make a film where my efforts at learning would be on the level of a performance. And so I started looking for what I called the ideal teacher. I met many Persian teachers, men and women, but none of them seemed to fit the bill. I then asked Behrouz Majidi, an Iranian I knew who had already acted in a film, to play the role of a teacher. The sort of teacher I was looking for had to be able to inspire us with just an alphabet primer and to convey a natural political slant to simple words found in the textbook, such as water or milk. So there is a great deal of scripting in the film. All the sequences were prepared in advance. For each letter of the alphabet I had a series of words that began with it and which I wanted to develop. So I asked my teacher to improvise on such-and-such a word. Behrouz Majidi was able to improvise beautifully, whether on a given word or on a concept such as freedom or joy. It was for his abilities as an improviser and storyteller, as well as his charisma, that I chose this man. C.G : You use drawings from a reading book published after the revolution, linking them to words or ideas inspired by the lesson, or taken from your childhood memories. Is it a way to imbibe innocuous images with a I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 8

9 symbolic or political force, or simply to make up for the lack of images in your native country? S.A. :This act of combination raises the question of how we apply what we have learnt, and also questions how much freedom there is in learning and in the language. Film writing is able to do just that to shift the definition of things as it pleases. In I comme Iran, I create a space where I can transform the act of teaching into a poetic language, or in other words, into a free language. The freedom that I give my self in that gesture is one I hope to share with the audience who in turn will also be free to create their own thought, history and emotion. I can show the image of a loaf of bread associated with the word bread just as I can show the image of a snake and associate it with a verb, in this instance breathe. A third object is created in fact between the image I decide to show and the word I associate with it. That object belongs to the audience, it no longer belongs to me. In that respect, it has, I hope, a poetic scope, by which I mean it gives the audience more than the sum of what it offers. The gap that lies between the object and the word associated with it is a reflection of the distance I have with my own country and more generally the gap between the image of Iran and Iran itself. C.G.: To film these drawings, you use big close-ups that reveal hundreds of coloured dots that make up the image. Is it the attention to detail, this wish to get as close as possible to things, that marks your approach? To go from the smallest i to reach the biggest (Iran)? S.A.: In the editing I instinctively needed to get as close as possible to the images in the textbook, to the point of revealing the texture, obscuring the identity of the objects within the teaching framework where normally each object is signified. This gesture is akin to naming objects other than by their proper definition. By approaching the surface detail this way, we go outside of the represented image and no longer see it for what it is. We find ourselves in a new world where identity is blurred. This identity that is blurred by the distance in viewpoint reflects my own blurred identity, be that due to my inability to write in my mother tongue or the distance with my native country. Getting close into the surface of these images comes down to finding a personal space of freedom and invention in this perdition. In some ways it s a sort of re-appropriation of one s mother tongue, one s country and its culture via film. Film writing bridges illiteracy in one s native language. Whether in a Persian rug or on a pixelated screen, any frame is related to an idea of distance. What fascinates me is the fact of losing or finding the pattern depending on the distance of one s viewpoint, and that the closer one approaches the frame the less one actually sees the whole object. In I comme Iran, as we progress further and further in the film, we see the objects less and less; the objects are increasingly blurred, Iran is less and less defined. But in defining something are we not in fact rendering it finite? Shouldn t we talk about the indefinition of things? A way of defining the infinite? But even as I lose the identity of the images, because of my lessons I begin little by little to see the words and the words are also images. I comme Iran is perhaps a film about the impossibility of defining a country, to render an image of Iran. When I started making the film, I posed lots of questions about Iran s future, and the closer I got to my subject the fewer answers I found. Just like the image of the frame, where the closer we get to it, the more blurred, the more ill-defined the pattern becomes. And so we enter into a sort of abstract shape, a new space where each of us, I hope, can construct our own image. I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 9

10 PRODUCTION The Centre Vidéo de Bruxelles sees itself as an Image-focused enterprise the general layout of which has a clearly visible structure built around five major axes: the art house documentary tackling social, political and art issues and constantly searching for new forms; working together with associations in close collaboration to achieve a shared goal; video workshops real hubs for creation and reflection, open to a wide audience; a carefully selected catalogue focus on coherence and vision; and continuous reflection on the power of the image as truth. Diverse approaches and individuality of content, where various genres, techniques and personal visions rub shoulders; hybridisation, the linking of an artistic approach with a more social one focusing on issues in society, attention given to individuals who are not experts, politicians, or leaders, but ordinary citizens are all recurrent themes in our approach. QUELQUES FILMS PHARES - Catalogue Casus Belli, sur les sentiers de la paix Anne Lévy-Morelle (101'/2014) Mauvaises herbes Catherine Wielant et Caroline Vercruysse (50'/2013) Deux fois le même fleuve Effi Weiss et Amir Bornstein ( ) Chaumière - Emmanuel Marre (70'/2013) Bons baisers de la colonie - Nathalie Borgers (74'/2011) Ateliers Urbains #1-Flagey / #2-Le grand Nord - atelier vidéo ( ) Le geste ordinaire Maxime Coton (64'/2010) Dem dikk (aller retour) - Karine Birgé (54'/2010) Le bateau du père - Clémence Hébert (75'/2009) Extérieur Rue - Anne Closset et Carmen Blanco Principal (40'/2008) Autoportraits de l'autre. De Belgique en Palestine - Gérard Preszow (48'/2008) Los Nietos, quand l'espagne exhume son passé - Marie-Paule Jeunehomme (59'/2008) Trilogie tropicale : La Belgique vue des Tropiques, Ça déménage sous les Tropiques, Voyage aux Tropiques ateliers vidéos ( ) L'argent des pauvres - Charlotte Randour (24'/2005) La Cité dans tous ses Etats - Jacques Borzykowski et Vincent Cartuyvels (30'/2004) La raison du plus fort - Patric Jean (85'/2003) Chaînes de garde - Nicolas Torres Correia (25'/2002) Les enfants du Borinage, lettre à Henri Storck de Patric Jean (54'/1999) Y'a pas honte de Jacques Borzykowski et Monique Meyfroet (70'/1998) COPRODUCTIONS RTBF (Radio Télévision Belge Francophone) Centre de l'audiovisuel à Bruxelles (CBA) Beursschouwburg With the support Centre du Cinéma et de l'audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles Voo Commission Communautaire française (COCOF) CONTACT CVB - CENTRE VIDEO DE BRUXELLES 111 RUE DE LA POSTE - B-1030 BRUXELLES (0) Philippe Cotte philippe.cotte@cvb-videp.be (0) I COMME IRAN I FOR IRAN PRESS KIT - 10