Creativity Refuses to Wilt in Iran

Samira Makhmalbaf got the idea for her first movie from a small item on the evening news. Twin girls, age 12, had been rescued from parents who had kept them housebound since they were born. Unschooled and unexposed to anyone but their blind mother and elderly, deeply religious father, they walked as if severely disabled and couldn’t pronounce real words. They had never even been bathed.

With a sense of urgency, Makhmalbaf convinced reluctant authorities and the family to let her make a film about the case--and rather than use actors, she wanted the twins, their parents, neighbors and social workers to play themselves. Eleven days after she began shooting, with an idea but no formal script--and without ever doing a second take--”The Apple” was finished.

“I couldn’t wait to start, because I knew the kids would change quickly,” she explained recently.

And they did. Her anguishing yet often sweetly humorous film, completed in 1997, chronicles the girls discovering life, from their first walk in the sun and their first look in a mirror to their first game. It was soon hailed by reviewers from Paris to New York, shown at 70 film festivals around the world and awarded prizes in Britain, Switzerland, Greece, Brazil and Argentina.

After “The Apple” was released, the only young person in Iran more famous than the twins was Makhmalbaf herself. She was just 17--the youngest director ever to have a work shown at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

Makhmalbaf is a symbol of Iran two decades after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It is a society bursting with creativity despite stiff religious restrictions. It’s a country where culture is helping shape public discussion and raise the national consciousness. It’s also a land in transition, home both to children sequestered from birth and a world-renowned teenage film director.

Makhmalbaf’s emergence reflects what arguably is the revolution’s most unexpected byproduct: a vibrant and original cinema that, in an ironic twist, now challenges many of the goals of the mullahs who toppled the shah. The saga of the twins, for example, has fueled heated debate about the degree of liberty the paternal clergy allows its flock, particularly its female flock.

“What I noticed about the girls is that the more they came into contact with society, the more complete they became as human beings. For me, their story became a metaphor for all women,” Makhmalbaf said. Now 20, she still wears her raven hair in girlish braids, but she speaks with a maturity far beyond her years.

In the twins’ father’s simplistic devotion to rigid Islamic codes, “The Apple” also pointedly warns of the dangers of religious fanaticism.

“The Koran explains the reason for the father’s behavior,” Makhmalbaf said. “It says girls are like flowers, that they’ll wilt if exposed to sunlight. It sounds beautiful, like poetry. But it’s not good that these bad things are written like poetry in ways you believe are absolute truths.”

The film, however, ends on a surprisingly upbeat note. In one of several poignant scenes, a social worker discovers that the father has locked up the girls again before going off to work--selling prayers for coins, a locally acceptable form of begging--because he doesn’t know how else to “protect” them. Upon his return, she locks him up instead and frees the girls to roam their neighborhood, play for the first time with other children, taste ice cream and pet a goat.

Again, the message is clear: Freedom is essential to the growth of the human spirit.

Iran’s bold film industry has flourished because of the isolation provided by a revolution that initially cut off the outside world. With limited foreign competition, local filmmakers filled the void. The monarchy’s end also opened the way for artists to explore forms of expression beyond what the royal court had ordered, supported or condoned and beyond the American, European and Indian models that had dominated local screens.

Like many in her generation, Makhmalbaf grew up without seeing any of world cinema’s classics. Her family didn’t even have a videocassette player to show foreign movies brought into the country illegally and circulated on Tehran’s black market.

The resulting freshness of Makhmalbaf’s style--a kind of rawness that often blurs the lines between reality and fiction--also is on display in her second film, “Blackboards.” Set along the Iran-Iraq border in the rugged region known as Kurdistan as war raged between the two countries in the 1980s, it tells the story of two itinerant teachers. With large blackboards strapped to their backs, they search for students or anyone else willing to learn.

The subplot that unfolds amid the teachers’ encounters with child smugglers and refugees is an unusual love story. After one of the pair weds a widowed refugee in an arranged marriage--a practice still prevalent in Iran--he uses his blackboard to try to explain love and commitment to his new wife. But she balks. And in the end, she leaves him.

“You can’t teach love or impose loyalty,” Makhmalbaf said, voicing another theme with strong resonance within Iran’s social and political systems.

Letting Characters Be Themselves

For all the obstacles faced by the characters, from chemical weapons to poverty, this second film also is filled with moments of subtle humor, even hilarity. The blackboards often wind up being used for other purposes, from serving as a stretcher to paying the price for a bride.

With one exception, the cast of the movie is made up of amateurs, all local Kurds.

“I loved the geography of their faces,” the young director said. Most of the new actors had never seen a movie before.

One of the two leads was a porter who helped Makhmalbaf, then 19, ferry equipment into the Kurdish mountains.

“He inspired me to make his character,” she said. “I don’t try to make a form and then force these characters to fit. I want real life to happen in my movies. I told them the kinds of things to say, but I didn’t dictate. I knew they’d say the right things because they were the characters themselves.

“In the same way, I didn’t tell them what was going to happen--in part because I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t an exact script,” she added, laughing. “I had different endings, but I didn’t know till the last moment which one I wanted. They inspired me to decide what would happen.”

To remain true to the culture, Makhmalbaf also shot the movie in the relatively obscure Kurdish language, making it a foreign-language film even in Iran--despite the fact that there are only a handful of movie houses in Kurdish enclaves in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria.

“At least 99% of the audience for this movie won’t speak Kurdish, but I had to make it in Kurdish for the same reasons I had to make it in Kurdistan,” Makhmalbaf said. “To capture the reality, I had to make it in the real language and the real conditions.”

She also remained true to the landscape, filming in narrow mountain passes and fields where Iraqi mines planted during the Mideast’s bloodiest modern war are still buried. Cast members helped the crew navigate around them. The company had limited electricity and little access to fresh water, and the climate was bone-chillingly cold. The film was shot with a single hand-held camera in 30 days. Total production took three months on a budget of about $200,000--large by Iranian standards.

Overcoming the Generation Gap

And those weren’t the only problems. Most of the cast members were two or three times older than Makhmalbaf, and all but one were male.

“At first, it’s hard--especially in our culture--to get men to take a younger woman seriously,” she said. “They think they’re superior. Some say you can’t be young and thin and female and be a serious director. But who says you have to be old and fat and male to make movies?

“A lot of barriers are being broken in Iran today. I show the men I work with that I’m their equal. I never ask them to do something I won’t do too,” she said.

In May, “Blackboards” became Makhmalbaf’s second film to be screened at Cannes, this time as part of the competition. But any recognition seemed so unlikely that she almost missed the awards ceremony.

“I didn’t intend to go. I was planning to go to Paris with some friends, but we couldn’t get a hotel,” she said.

Then her name was called. At the grand old age of 20, Makhmalbaf was co-winner of the Jury Prize, one of the four top awards at the festival. She is the youngest director ever to be honored at Cannes.

She used her victory to reflect on its meaning for Iran.

“I accept this prize on behalf of a new generation in my country and young people who are trying their best to create democracy and a better life,” she told the audience.

“I know I’m a metaphor for Iran,” she added in an interview later. “I represent a generation that is willing to go out and express its ideas. It’s like the girls in ‘The Apple,’ once having little communication and being retarded and then suddenly having exposure and growing rapidly to create something new.”

Makhmalbaf wasn’t the only Iranian to win at Cannes this year. The Camera d’Or prize for best first feature film was shared by two Iranian films: “A Time for Drunken Horses” and “Djomeh.” The latter was named after its lead character, a young boy. Together, Iranian films won more prizes than movies from any other country.

Two weeks after Cannes, Makhmalbaf also won Italy’s Fellini Prize, named for its greatest director--one whose work Makhmalbaf still has never seen.

Artists Getting More Recognition

Nor was this the first year that Iran’s cinema scored big on the festival circuit. Over the last six years, films from the Islamic Republic--many of them about children--have won dozens of awards at major festivals. “The White Balloon” won the Cannes Camera d’Or in 1995 and the New York Film Critics Award for best foreign film in 1996. “The Taste of Cherry,” the story of a man planning to kill himself, won the Palme d’Or, Cannes’ highest honor, in 1997. “Children of Heaven” was one of five finalists for the foreign film Oscar in 1999.

Iranian directors also are being increasingly recognized. Last year, Lincoln Center in New York, the American Film Institute in Washington and the Chicago Art Institute all held retrospectives of the work of Dariush Mehrjui, a UCLA alumnus and one of the first major directors to emerge after the revolution. His award-winning quartet of movies about women--who all either set out on their own or leave their husbands--has been shown worldwide.

Another of Iranian cinema’s post-revolutionary heavyweights is Makhmalbaf’s father, Mohsen. Imprisoned for five years by the shah for attacking a policeman, a crime he committed when he was 17, Mohsen Makhmalbaf made some of the country’s most religious and ardently revolutionary films after 1979.

In the mid-1980s, however, his films began to challenge the ruling orthodoxy. One, made at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, was blatantly antiwar. Another, titled “Time of Love,” told the story of a married woman who falls for a younger man. It was banned in Iran for five years, not because of its theme of forbidden love but because it had three endings--from the perspectives of the woman, her husband and the younger man. Implicit was the message that perception varies, and so does the truth. There is no “single path,” as orthodox Muslims believe.

The elder Makhmalbaf’s most unusual movie is “A Moment of Innocence,” about his knife attack on one of the shah’s policemen. He and the officer he assaulted play themselves. As the largely unscripted story unfolded, both discovered how much they had changed since the incident.

Makhmalbaf’s influence on his daughter is obvious. At 6 months of age and again at age 8, Samira had minor roles in his films. She pressured him to let her drop out of school when she was 15 to be tutored in movie-making--by him. She brought along friends, and his impromptu classes eventually became known as their “Ecole du Cinema.”

“Loving cinema was part of loving my family,” she said.

Nor is she the only other movie-maker in the family. Her younger sister Hanna was only 8 when she made her first short film, “The Day My Aunt Was Ill.” Her younger brother made a documentary about the filming of “Blackboards.” And her stepmother recently finished “The Day That I Became a Woman.”

The senior Makhmalbaf talked Samira through the ideas for both of her movies and then edited them. And she still lives with the family and works out of their small apartment-cum-office, which is decorated with posters from their films.

But the strong-willed older daughter is just as clearly already a force unto herself. While in Kurdistan, she didn’t even call home during the filming.

“I’m like the new generation in Iran,” she said, smiling. “I can do this on my own.”