Khab-e talkh

This gem of a film deserves a much wider audience than it will inevitably get. I saw it at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2004 in a small audience who spilt out thrilled to have seen the best film in that year's Festival. The bonus of meeting Mohsen Amiryoussefi, the director of the film, after the screening made it very special. The charm and intelligence of his approach and his modesty only acted to complement the brilliance of Amiryoussefi's instinctive and compelling film-making and his years of dedication to making one of the most original cinematic statements of recent years.

The film is well described in another of the postings so I'll spare you a rehash of that. What especially made the experience magical was the sure-footed direction that at first misleads you into thinking that you are seeing a straight documentary. Then the film seems to falter when "impossible" TV footage makes the documentary look "dishonest". At this point, I was convinced the film was a sham and the director was not in control of his material. Then over the next minutes it becomes apparent that Mohsen Amiryoussefi is a conjurer and even a genius. In fact, he has never mislead, but rather taken us on a journey to fresh pastures (no less) by letting us believe that we were watching a conventionally filmed documentary initially. What Amiryoussefi delivers is as far away from a "normal" film as it is possible to be - and all the better for it.

This is one of the masterpieces of recent world cinema. See it if you get a chance. It's a great film and ask yourself: "How many Iranian comedies have you ever seen?". Here's your chance!

"Bitter dreams" is an unforgettable debut by 32 year-old Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Amiryousefi, who first took to mathematics as a career and then to film-making. The film has, a few days ago, won the grand prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece. I caught up with the film and its filmmaker at the on-going Dubai Film Festival. The film has only been screened twice within Iran, according to the director, but has been shown at Cannes, Thessaloniki and Dubai film festivals.

The film is a black comedy filmed in a pseudo-documentary style--probably better known as "mockumentary." The film revolves around a handful of individuals who run the rough equivalent of an undertakers establishment in a small town in Iran. The dead are washed, cleaned and buried covered with a special cloth by certain individuals. For female corpses, there is a lady to do the needful. A grave is dug by the grave digger. All the other clothes, ornaments, dentures, watches, jewelry are supposed to be burnt by another individual. The financial payments of the activities are divided by the chief of the cemetery, Esfandiar, and a portion of the profits go the local cleric.

The director does not document these activities in the traditional way a documentary film would. Instead he chooses to use the documentary film technique in an unusual way to film fiction. He uses real locations, real workers of the graveyard, and a pseudo-TV interview technique of questions and answers. Sometimes you only hear the questions, sometimes only the answers--you are forced to guess what you have not heard. Sometimes both questions and answers are heard.

Half-way into the film, "the recordings" take a life of their own on the TV of Esfandiar, the sullen bodywasher, who looks after the graveyard. The TV acts as a source of information to Esfandiar on what the others working with him think of him. The TV set appears to suggest that Ezrael, the Angel of Death is coming for him. The TV set allows Esfandiar to have a "dialog" with modern day undertakers in Iran's cities. It allows him (and the viewer of the film) to compare the historical variants of dealing with the dead (the ancient Egyptians, the skulls that remind you of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, etc.). The director allows the black and white TV to switch off and on on its own. Is it Esfandiar's inner self? Is it his alter ego? This is a unique technique in cinema--reminding you of Stanley Kubrick's HAL the computer in "2001--A Space Odyssey."

Was Amiryousefi influenced by any director, I asked, after the screening? None, he asserted, to me. He is probably truthful as his film-making is indeed unusual. There are times when you are reminded of the late Cuban filmmaker Tomas Alea's "Death of a Bureaucrat." The mathematician in Amiryousefi surfaces--he lets Esfandiar describe the numeral "5" as the pregnant woman and "9" as the old man, obviously referring to the visual imagery of the number.

There are several indirect references to Shakespeare's gravedigger in Hamlet--talk of a girl committing suicide after falling in love with someone, a quibble on "to be or not to be", and the production of a skull from the grave being dug.

The "bitter dream" of preparing for the time when death's angel knocks on your door has been worked on by many directors worldwide. Ingmar Bergman distinguished himself on the subject with "The Seventh Seal." But unlike the serious Bergman, Amiryousefi looks at the universal eventuality with humor--black humor. You can enter heaven, if all those you harmed in life forgave you. If you are clever in life, you can buy forgiveness from those you had hurt in the past. Typical of current Iranian cinema, there is no sex, no profanity, only black humor with a hint of satire. Is life all about death? Does Ezrael sound like Israel, or is it our socio-political awareness reading too much into the film? Why does Esfandiar interfere in courtship of two grown up individuals--he chooses to interfere from afar with binoculars--not from the mountain top. He knows well he is loser in love (he is single, unmarried and childless) and in life, but wants to win in death and reach heaven.

This is unusual, brilliant, and path-breaking low budget ("no-budget" according to the director) cinema that hopefully will be seen by many in Iran and elsewhere. Iranian cinema is indeed on the march this decade.

This is a fantastic, Monty-Pytonesque comedy from the Iranian cinema. The director is a former mathematician, which is probably why everything in the movie fits so well together. The casting is brilliant, the leading character bears an uncanny resemblance to the angel of death. And it certainly takes a mathematician to make a comedy about grave yards, washing dead bodies, and dying itself. The jokes come in many layers, some probably hidden from non-Iranian viewers, for example, every time you see the clergyman, he's either being given money, or is literally sitting in the middle of a pool of money. The credits at the end of the movie are not translated properly either, here the director makes one last joke by putting a RIP or equivalent after all names, and gives special thanks to all graveyard personnel, which includes the dead people. Overall, it's an unusually upbeat movie from a cinema that specializes is somber, dark movies.

I watched this movie in Istanbul Film Festival today and I am deeply affected and excited by its sincerity, power of observation, humor and style. I'm sorry to confess that "Bitter Dream" is the first Iranian movie I've ever watched, but I think that it won't be the last.

Unlike many movies claiming to stand against time but lose all of their power after a few years, I believe Mohsen Amiryoussefi's movie really gives the scent of the ordinary life of common people in a timeless manner. Although the movie is built around a group of people working in a graveyard, in my opinion, we experience unforgettable images of the depth and color of the human mind, conflicts between the "self" and "others" in a sort of an existentialist way.

Finally, the movie proves once again that art is independent of big monetary budgets and special computer techniques.

Thanks for this sincere and simple movie.