Excess of evil Humanism prevails at the MFA’s festival of Iranian film BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Eleventh Annual Festival of Film & Music From Iran At the Museum of Fine Arts November 12 through December 12.

Funny the difference 25 years can make. In 1979, the Islamic Revolution toppled the shah and established a fundamentalist theocracy under the Ayatollah Khomeini. The ayatollah promptly denounced the United States, hotbed of secularism and humanism, as "The Great Satan." This year in the United States, the electorate has rejected humanism, confirming a fundamentalist trend toward a theocracy of our own, and has returned for a second term a president who denounces Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil." Meanwhile, to judge from its recent output of films, including those in this year’s festival at the MFA, Iran seems to be having second thoughts about the whole fundamentalism thing and finding that secularism and humanism might make sense after all.

Perhaps the turning point for both countries in their parallel but opposite courses has been the example of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan. For both the US and Iran, these icons of excess represent the epitome of Islamic fanaticism and its consequences. The US has responded with an ideological fanaticism of its own. Iranians — at least those whose ideas get communicated to the rest of the world via cinema — have responded with doubt in their convictions and the direction their country has taken.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, for example, whose anti-Taliban pseudo-documentary Kandahar enjoyed unexpected interest from Western audiences after September 11. His Afghan Alphabet (2001; December 3 at 6 p.m. and December 11 at 11 a.m.) probably won’t repeat that success because no one is interested in the fate of homeless Afghans any more. This unconventional, poetic documentary roams about a refugee center on the Iranian border, one sheltering a fraction of the millions of Afghans fleeing their homeland. The children there seek an education, but they encounter bureaucratic, cultural, and religious obstacles. To attend the Iranian schools, they must be citizens, so they huddle outside, chanting in response to the lessons they overhear. Or they can attend religious schools, whose educational value is doubtful, as Makhmalbaf points out by baffling pupils with such questions as "What is God?" The UN-sponsored schools offer the most hope, but patriarchal religious tyranny interferes. The film ends with a teacher coaxing a 10-year-old girl to lift her burqa and so be able to see the lessons on the blackboard.

Makhmalbaf’s feelings about women’s rights are pretty clear, since he wrote the screenplay for his daughter Samira’s At Five in the Afternoon (2003; November 13 at 4:30 p.m. and November 26 at 8 p.m.). Set in the apocalyptic landscape of post-invasion Afghanistan, the film follows the wanderings of a traditionalist old man, his spirited daughter, and her bereft sister-in-law, who waits for her missing husband while nursing an ailing infant. Episodic and punctuated with moments of bleak and terrible beauty, it nonetheless offers hope in the form of the young daughter, who resists her father’s oppression with a pair of party shoes and dreams of becoming the future president of the country. The title comes from the first line of a Federico García Lorca poem ("Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías") that’s recited to her by a blithe Pakistani refugee, one of the few moments of lyricism in a film of Samuel Beckett–like desolation.

A Waiting for Godot atmosphere likewise hangs over Ali-Reza Amini’s Tiny Snowflakes (2003; November 21 at 4 p.m. and November 28 at 12:10 p.m.), in which a pair of unwashed and unbalanced watchmen guard a godforsaken mine in the middle of a snow-swept no man’s land. Or rather, no woman’s land, as the only contact they have with females is a distant glimpse of a passing woman and a handful of fetishistic treasures — a discarded radio, a woman’s shoe. Bewildering, hilarious, and touching, Amini’s vision presents his country as a buffoonish wasteland.

Is Iran a barren mine watched over by a pair of sex-starved bumblers? Or is it a derelict shrine watched over by an idiot with an existential crisis? If Amini seems more inclined to Beckett’s absurdity, Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi’s Here, a Shining Light (2003; December 4 at 3:30 p.m. and December 12 at 3:45 p.m.) seems inspired by Buñuel’s surreal religiosity. A mentally disabled man must watch over the ramshackle shrine to Sultan Aziz while his uncle, the caretaker, is away for medical treatment. Like Dostoyevsky’s idiot, the nephew, with his lack of common sense, seems in touch with a higher power, or the lack of it. Dismayed by the lost faith of his neighbors, harried by the ghost of a dead miner (perhaps from Tiny Snowflakes) and nocturnal visions of the sultan himself, the temporary caretaker ends up giving the roof over his head to his uncomprehending flock. Reminiscent of Viridiana with a final scene evocative of El ángel exterminador, Here, a Shining Light is an uneven but haunting fable.

Perhaps Iran instead is a dinner party with no food hosted by a near-hysterical traditionalist woman and her feckless, movie-buff husband. Veteran director Dariush Mehrjui (The Cow, Leila) may be no Preston Sturges when it comes to ensemble screwball comedy, but his Mama’s Guest (2004; November 12 at 7:45 p.m.) nonetheless delivers a powerful humanist message of common values, redemptive altruism, and tolerance of others. The guest of the title is mama’s nephew "the Colonel" (actually a sergeant in the police force), whose visit with his new bride arouses her to panic and her raffish husband to indifference. Their plight at first annoys their neighbors, who include an old woman who regards her chickens as her children, a chemistry student searching for an immunity shot against unhappiness, and an addict who could use such a drug and who in the meantime beats his pregnant wife. In the end, they’re moved to help out, and the community is vindicated. A lot of the humor seems strained or gets lost in translation; you might wind up feeling like a guest who’s stayed past the right moment to leave.

The film buff in Mama’s Guest is almost the only instance of self-reflexivity in this year’s festival, a situation that’s very uncharacteristic of Iranian films. Abbas Kiarostami makes up for the deficit with his 10 on Ten (2003; November 13 at 10:30 a.m. and November 27 at 4 p.m.), the consummate student film since it’s a textbook for filmmakers that the director draws from his most recent feature, Ten. Like Ten, the film consists of 10 episodes, or lessons, related by Kiarostami in a monologue as he drives around the Tehran landscape that was the setting for his 1997 masterpiece Taste of Cherry. Among the subjects covered are his neo-realistic notions of cinema’s purpose, his use of non-actors, his enthusiasm for digital video, and his obsession with setting his films entirely within the suffocating confines of automobiles. A great introduction to great cinema, 10 on Ten is not great cinema itself (perhaps with deliberate irony), and it’s a relief when the director cuts from himself nattering on behind the wheel of his circling SUV to illustrative excerpts from the earlier films or a shot of a busy anthill.

Mania Akbari, for one, learned Kiarostami’s lessons well. The "non-actor" star of Ten, she has begun her own filmmaking career with the derivative but racier 20 Fingers (2004; December 10 at 8:20 p.m. and December 11 at 1:30 p.m.). It opens in typical Kiarostami fashion with a shot inside an automobile that being driven at night in the outskirts of Tehran. Inside, a man and his fiancée (played by Akbari) chat. She tells him about playing "doctor" with her cousin; he responds with mild disapproval but is turned on. How sexually pathological the situation is becomes more evident when the screen goes black and dialogue and sound suggest the kind of scandalous incident one doesn’t expect in Iranian films.

But the relationship between the man and woman persists through seven more episodes, as the couple apparently marry and have a child and engage in further arguments in a variety of conveyances from a motorbike to a ski lift that almost seem like a parody of Kiarostami’s motifs. Akbari, though, has her own agenda, a spirited feminism like that of a veiled Catherine Breillat as she pits her modern persona (the title comes from an old wives’ tale regarding how many men a woman might sleep with before being considered a whore) against her creepy, intransigent macho counterpart in a seemingly irresolvable conflict.

Speaking of irresolvable conflicts: does anyone remember the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-’89 in which Saddam Hussein was our good buddy and we helped provide the WMDs with which he fought his enemies and ours? As depicted in Azizollah Hamidnezhad’s The Tear of the Cold (2003; November 19 at 6 p.m. and November 20 at noon), that struggle seems a lot like the conflict we’re involved in today in Iraq. In 1983 at an isolated outpost in Iranian Kurdistan, soldiers find themselves unable to tell friend from foe as local insurgents pick them off with improvised explosives and roadside bombs. The Iranians bring in a bomb expert who decides that the key to success is earning the sympathy of the people. This he does by falling in love with a pretty shepherdess who is also a spy for the rebels. The story follows familiar conventions, somewhat clumsily, though with enough of a difference to make them seem newly tragic. So too, it seems, history has followed a familiar pattern, though with a difference that makes it newly tragic as well.