‘Ten’ journeys into oppression in Iran

The UCLA Film Archives’ 13th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema is always one of the major events on the Archive calendar, and this year’s series appropriately kicks off with Abbas Kiarostami’s “Ten,” the latest compelling work from the internationally renowned master filmmaker. “Ten” takes its title from the number of rides a young and beautiful, self-liberated middle-class woman (Mania Akbari) takes with others in her car as she drives around Tehran over the course of several days. Filming largely from a dashboard-mounted camera, Kiarostami has found an ideal device to reveal through the driver’s interaction with others the continuing oppression of women in Iran.

This is hardly a new topic, but what’s stirring here is how the driver affects her passengers, including her own small son, an already full-fledged traditional male supremacist who literally holds his hands over his ears in his refusal to hear his mother out as to why she felt she had the right to divorce his father and remarry happily.

Few of the offerings in the annual New York Independent Film and Video Festival, which kicks off tonightwith a gala at the Wyndham Bel Age hotel and runs through Feb. 16 at the Laemmle Fairfax Cinemas and Raleigh Studios, are available for preview. This year’s handful that could be seen in advance proved decidedly disappointing, with the exception of Shinsuke Sato’s bleakly compelling “The Princess Blade.” First filmed in 1973 as a traditional-style saga of samurai revenge, it has been boldly and imaginatively reset in the near future. For generations, members of the Takemikazuchi clan have stuck together since losing their positions as swords-for-hire guards to a deposed monarch. They are now in the service of the government to put down any rebels in what has become an escalating consumer society with an accompanying loss of freedom of expression.

On the verge of her 20th birthday, at which time she would become the clan ruler with the title of princess, the peerless swordswoman Yuki (Yumiko Shaku) learns that her mother had not been killed by clan enemies 15 years earlier but by its current leader, Byakurai (Kyusaku Shimada). Yuki crosses paths with a government rebel, Takashi (Hideaki Ito), who has grown weary of the deaths caused by his group’s terrorist attacks in the name of freedom.

Their story is told with such rigor and spare visual style that it is quickly involving. The film is studded with bravura sword-play staged by Donnie Yen, who choreographed the fight scenes for the recent “Blade II.”

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Screenings

“Ten”: Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., James Bridges Theatre, Melnitz Hall, UCLA, Westwood.

(310) 206-FILM.

“The Princess Blade”: Feb. 13, 10 p.m., Laemmle Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. (866) 468-7619.