Keshtzar haye sepid

Last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Mohammad Rasoulof, Iranian director of the allegorical fable The White Meadows, spoke out against the Tehran regime saying "I come from a country full of contradictions and suffering, where there is a dictatorship," and "censorship does not allow me to talk openly about what happens in my country." The following March, both Rasoulof and world-acclaimed director Jafir Panahi were arrested as part of the government's reaction to those claiming that the election of President Ahmadinejad in June 2009 election was a fraud. Rasoulof was released shortly after his arrest in March but Panahi remained in prison until the following May.

The White Meadows, Rasoulof's mesmerizing and poetic film about an old man who travels to places of sorrow to collect tears, appears to be a disguised attack on the perils of religious dogmatism, though it also can be taken simply as a surreal Kafkaesque nightmare. Set in Lake Urmia close to Azerbaijan, Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi), an aging boatman, visits the region's white salt islands to collect people's tears in a glass vial. "I've come to listen to people's heartaches and take away tears," he says as he rows among the gray waters in the third-largest saltwater lake in the world. It is an otherworldly landscape.

Rahmat encounters many tales of grief and sees many injustices but he is powerless to intervene. He has been doing this for thirty years and the people cooperate because they believe that their tears will turn into pearls. What he does with the tears is not fully explained. We see him first at a funeral for a young woman whose body was preserved in salt until Rahmat can take her off the island and dispose of her body. It is not clear how the woman died but the implication is clear that she was killed, possibly by stoning, by having too provocative a figure. One of the villagers tells Rahmat that it was good that she had died because she was "too beautiful to live among us". She could not be buried on the island because lustful men would dig up her body and violate the corpse.

When Rahmat takes her in his boat, he uncovers her far from shore only to find a very much alive teenage boy, Nassim (Younes Ghazali), who snuck off the island so that he can look for his father. Rahmat first throws young Nissim into the cruel waters then relents and says that the boy can go with him if he pretends to be his deaf and mute son. Recalling that tears can turn into pearls, the naïve youngster steals a jar full of tears and is severely reprimanded by Rahmat when discovered. At the next island, a beautiful young virgin, dressed for a wedding, is offered as a bride to the sea to appease the sea gods. No one does anything to stop this barbaric action and Rahmat is content to fill up more vials of tears.

At the last minute Nissim swims out to sea to try and rescue her but he is intercepted and brought back to the island to be stoned by the elders. Rahmat saves his life but the boy is severely injured and once again the powerful succeed at the expense of the compassionate. On the next island, a crippled dwarf (Omid Zare) is chosen to deliver the secrets of the villagers (whispered into a glass jar) to the fairies at the bottom of a well before daylight. Fearing that he will not make it in time, the rope is cut and he perishes. An even more bizarre occurrence takes place at the next island. The White Meadows is an upsetting film filled with many tears, but it is a film of stark visual beauty aided by the powerful imagery of Ebrahim Ghafouri's camera-work. The film makes a strong statement about the need for morality and justice.

As if the natural world wasn't harsh enough, we bring so much misery upon ourselves and others. Humanity is hateful.

A salted symbolism seems to evaporate off the screen in Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's "The White Meadows". Rasoulof, who wrote, directed and produced "The White Meadows",is closely associated to the Iranian New Wave Movement of Cinema. The film was awarded the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for Best Feature at the 2010 Denver Film Festival.

"The White Meadows" was edited by one of the Iranian New Wave's most prominent figures, Jafar Panahi. Along with "The White Meadows" cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafori, Rasoulof and Panahi were arrested by Iranian authorities on March 1, 2010. In this review of the film, there is just no way for me to tackle the complex web of issues surrounding Iran's oppression of its artists.

That said, as with several Iranian films, the suppressed freedom to express art and ideas in Iran hold an elemental place in "The White Meadows". Rasoulof's tale goes beyond the neo-realist qualities so often described in Iranian New Wave Cinema. The film is vividly real in its humanistic portrayals and natural landscapes, but under the folkloric lens of Rasoulof, Panahi and Ghafori it drifts into magic-realism.

Mohammad Rasoulof's "The White Meadows" is a masterpiece that will creep deep in your skin and will haunt your memory for a long time. The allegory of the film is a punch into the stomach, it's imagery of insuperable beauty and the story line an anthropological journey into the very essence of human societies. The ambiguous main character of the film Rahman, reserves for the spectator a place on his boat. Following him the viewer collects the tears of humans patiently getting immersed in a overwhelming study of human sorrow. In Rahman's boat one glides from island to island beholding speechless the rites, customs and superstitions of an unknown, but very familiar society.

Art, as every human action, requires the combination of scarce means towards the achievement of valued ends. Rasoulof picks as the setting of his film the lake Daryacheh in the north of Iran, which is a landscape of utmost harshness and physical beauty. While the means of the filmmaker seem to be quite limited, Rasoulof exploits tremendously well the physical beauty of the lake. He sets before our eyes an archipelagos of islands and islets and gives us the impression of an endless world from where no escape is possible. In these extremities the director establishes his plot, reconstructing effectively an entire human society. As the movie progresses we get insights in the customs and the institutions of the people, a puzzle that won't be completed until the very last scene . Then, with a masterful regression the film starts again at its very end. The director attains an astonishing cinematic achievement, with very little means at his disposition.

One could claim that Rasoulof, is discovering his own language assimilating elements from Iranian and European Masters. The cinematography of the film is of extraordinary beauty. The director draws on canvases playing with the water, the mistiness, the reflections, the white rugged rock and the salty scenery to produce a stunning and dreamlike world. The imagery functions on a poetic level by way of symbols and allegory. Some of the images are so exceptional than converted into photography or poetry they could retain their forcefulness. The director moves slowly and carefully from a scene to another allowing us the time to sit comfortably in the stern of Rahman's boat and reflect on the nature of his world. The more we behold the people the more we can envisage how it would feel like to be among them. The journey that we undertake is a vicarious experience immersed into visceral emotions. In the White Meadows, Rasoulof is possibly learning from currents and directors like the Italian Neorealism, Kurastami, Tarkovski and Angelopoulos, however his attainment belongs distinguishably to Rasoulof.

The White Meadows can be seen as an allegory to the current political regime of Iran, nonetheless the message conveyed by it is universal. The characters of the film could stand as the prototypes of a disutopian Platonic state. Rahman, the main character, remains an illegible until the very end of the film. The rules of his profession are simple. He wanders like a country-side doctor ,to places where people are mourning, collecting their tears, unaffected by the plights of his patients. During the film, one might try in vain to find the driving elements of his behavior. The laymen of this society appear to be fearful and extremely concerned with their own superstitions to have any critical thought. A little renegade who represents the curious, passionate and adventurous mind and an artist who sees the world differently from his fellows are sacrificed in a setting that could be inspired by ancient Greek tragedy. The director was actually arrested along with Panahi on the 1st of March 2010.

In my humble view, Rasoulof, in his 37,has directed a masterpiece of utmost intricacy and aesthetic value. His work is one of those destined to reside in our memory for a long time. Thus, I hope that the White Meadows will find their way to the movie theaters, our memories and ultimately film history . In the meanwhile, I hope that Rasoulof will continue to deliver us great films and to ameliorate his artistic language, despite the difficulties encountered in his homeland.