Friday's festival of Iranian films closed this year's four-day International Writers Project, which celebrated artists and writers persecuted in their home countries.
The film festival kicked off with Shirin Neshat's short film adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur's novel "Women Without Men." The film follows four women in 1953, the year a coup d'etat backed by the United States toppled Iran's democratically elected government and re-instated the Iranian monarchy.
Though the film is not yet finished, a short segment, "Zarin," was screened at the film festival. This short film examines a day in life of an Iranian prostitute who awakens to find her perception of men completely changed. She spends her day attempting to rid herself of this new view, in which all men look like monsters, with no eyes or mouths.
Neshat primarily works in a photographic medium, giving her film the quality and composition of a photograph and limiting the importance of narration. Indeed, the film lacked subtitles and was carried by the power of its visual imagery. "Neshat creates a dialogue among various cultures. She gives a visual sense that transcends translation," said artist and the director of "Whistle" Kouross Esmeali, who introduced the film.
The movie's most powerful scene has no dialogue at all. Zarin walks to a bathhouse to alter her mind's image of men as monsters by bathing. The laughter and amiable conversations of other bathers contrast with Zarin's horrific expressions of sorrow. She scrubs her skin so roughly that she begins to bleed. Her emaciated body and sunken eyes illustrate pain and hopelessness with more resonance than mere words.
"She engages with traditional Orientalist images of Jerome's painting of women in a bathhouse," Esmeali said. "We usually see voluptuous and sensual Middle Eastern women, now she has transferred that onto an anorexic body."
Another film showed Iranian society in a comedic light. "The Lizard" initially passed the Iranian clergy's screening but was banned in the country after two weeks because of its immense popularity, Esmeali said. Reza Mesaghali, the film's protagonist, disguises himself as a mullah, an Islamic cleric, to escape imprisonment for armed robbery. He goes to a border town to flee Iran but through a case of mistaken identity, he becomes the mullah of the town mosque. After a series of hijinks and narrow escapes, Reza finds God and realizes the importance of religion.
In a third film, an adaptation of Dostoevsky's short story "Bright Nights," a lonely professor finds love amid very odd circumstances. While walking one night, the professor encounters a woman waiting for her long-lost lover. They quickly become friends and explore the streets of Tehran while reciting ancient Persian poetry to each other.
Ultimately, the Iranian film festival provided a forum for commentary on how human beings survive under regimes of terror and intimidation.
