Irdische Verse

Iran cinema has continued to impress me with their ambitious atmospheres, stories, writing, and concepts and this movie is another masterful work.

Presented using interesting setting structures and direction approaches, many of the themes of authority over people and gender problems are well-explored with being mixed of both serious and satirical tones that are strong and appropriate. Many of the dialogue between the characters are amazing and nature, the performances from the cast are great, and the writing and camerawork is honestly great. The filmmaker succeeds on presenting the issues woman and people face in Iran with it's ambitious themes and the style choices and sound designs felt purposeful.

For a short run-time, it succeeds with many moments. Another Iranian masterpiece to add.

From my perspective as an Iranian viewer, the film feels superficial and exaggerated. It seems to have been created primarily to convey a message, but it lacks authenticity. It appears more suited for foreign film festivals, aiming to provoke the jury's emotions and win awards.

When you cannot create a strong, impactful story, the easiest route is to evoke pity: portray your country as miserable and pitiful, align with prevailing media narratives, and use female and child characters to manipulate emotions and secure recognition.

I am not saying all the narratives are false or unrealistic, but someone whose daughter goes to school, or someone working as a contracted driver for a governmental organization, etc. Would find these portrayals exaggerated and detached from reality.

It seems the writer and filmmaker are depicting an Iran that we do not live in.

Terrestrial Verses shows what everyday life in an authoritarian regime is like through a series of conversations. Although the circumstances of the conversations vary, they're always between a less-powerful person (facing the camera) and a more-powerful person (a voice off). Each situation is infuriating in its own way, but Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami mine a vein of absurd humor throughout the film, so that, by the end, we have laughed so hard at these authoritarian fools that they have lost their power. In life outside the film the fools only seem to grow more powerful and more numerous. The film is set in Iran, but its message is both universal and timely. It feels like many more people are very soon going to need Asgari's and Khataim's gift for seeing the absurd and their characters' cleverness in finding a way.

The film depicts how a person in power - even a little bit power - can abuse of it's position towards another person. This is of course obvious in a country with a totalitarianism regime like Iran, but not only. The authoritarianism abuse as depicted in the movie could also be seen as a metaphor for all abuse in general, wherever the country you live in. Are we not all, in some degree or another, sometimes subjected to abusive behavior by a overzealous clerk, frustrated official, sadistic policeman, bad-tempered secretary? This for example in the name of security, or health or safety, etc.

Sometimes we are not even aware of it. But how many times are we not taken in hostage by irritating websites who are forcing us to fill-in over and over again the same stupid data in order to pursue a request or demand. All that bureaucratic nonsense we are faced with in official offices but also private banks, insurance companies, post-offices, courthouses, hospitals, telephone companies, where sometimes we are confronted with people who are absolutely not willing to help you out but on the contrary will do everything to ruin your day or even abuse of their power to patronize or humiliate you.

So of course the plots of the movie are set in Iran but it's depicting brilliantly a general unfortunate human behavior which will be understood by everybody, wherever you live.

The film is rated 7.4 but deserves a much better rate in my opinion. The dialogues are well written, the actors are very just and realistic in their simplicity (it's almost like a documentary but yet it's all fiction) and the directors' choices for the staging of the actors and the positioning of the camera is accurate. In a nutshell a little gem worth seeing.

Saw this at the Rotterdam film festival 2024 (IFFR). A series of shorts, with a common theme: authority against the common man and woman. Luckily, contrary to what we could expect in Iran, not all scenes were an authoritarian man against a powerless woman. On the contrary, genders were evenly mixed, so the suppression of women in Iran was not the main theme.

Lots of humor involved, despite the seriousness of the respective situations. What happens is very recognizable, also outside Iran, and could overcome us tomorrow.

The shorts are completely unrelated plotwise, just the "authority" gaps were common. Nevertheless, a single counter example was the case of the student against the school director, where the tables seemed turned all of a sudden and the student could leave the room unpunished.

All in all, very satisfied to have seen this, devoid of the well-known Iranian issues. I scored a 5 out of 5 for the audience award after the screening.