It’s time to take studious sojourn into contemporary new wave Iranian cinema.  The most notable doyens of the movement being Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Majid Majidi, Bahram Beizai, Darius Mehrjui, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Khosrow Sinai, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Parviz Kimiavi, Amir Naderi and Abolfazl Jalili. Providing perspective peek into this genre, Suchitra Film Society, is screening two films by one of Iranian cinema’s talented young and pioneering woman director Samira Makhamalbaf.

A strindent battle cry against oppression of women in conservative Iran, The Apple, by Samira Makhmalbaf, 18-year-old prodigious daughter of one of Iran cinema’s trail-blazing flagbearer Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is a delectable, haunting debut feature film, which establishes the young auteur as a new force on global movie marquee.
Highly allusive and evocatively photographed, the film, inspired by real-life situation, closely follows the twin retarded daughters who have been kept confined at home since birth by the father. The welfare authorities, intervene following complaints by neighbours, and return them on condition that the two be free to leave home and explore outside world.

It tracks their ensuing exploits as the father’s philosophy bridles against the welfare edict.

The deeply moving film, which brims with humour and unusual charm, resonates with saga of human spirit and inevitable thirst for knowledge and individual freedom. It also throws up interesting scenario as to what happens when real and reel life come in contact, creating complex melange of docu-fiction.

Set in Kurdistan on the Iranian-Iraqi border, Blackboards, Samira’s second feature,  is about a large cumbersome blackboard, strapped to the backs of three interprid teachers in search of students and whose lives become intertwined by wanderers in the mountains.

Three parallel strands of stories ensue, around blackboards, which serve as shelter from nature as also gunfire and surveillance planes. Each teacher attempts contact with representatives of the region, such as teenagers smuggling stolen goods, and elderly Iranians trying to make their way home.

Despite the teachers’ well-meaning, noble ideals and sincere attempts to impart education among the people they encounter, however, hunger and insecurity has not left no chance for education of generations who, ever on the run, see no value in learning how to read and multiply.

Told with brutal honesty and searing sentisitivity, Blackboards, abounds in social observation and allegorical providing thought provoking, often moving and insightful, uncompromising account on madness of war.
Screenings Wed & Thur, Suchitra, Banashankari II Stage, 6.45 pm. For details 26711785.