Closed Curtain

Pardé

Iran

2013

106 Min

Color

Farsi

Currently 3.4/5 Stars.
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DIR Jafar Panahi, Kambuzia Partovi

CAST Kambuzia Partovi, Maryam Moghadam, Jafar Panahi, Hadi Saeedi, Azadeh Toradi, Agha Olla, Zeynab Khanum

SOUND Javad Emami

Berlinale (Competition): Best Screenplay, BAFICI (Panorama), CPH PIX (Iran: Behind the Curtain)

Synopsis

They are both on the run: the man with the dog he isn’t allowed to own because Islamic law deems it to be unclean, and the young woman who took part in an illicit party on the shores of the Caspian Sea. They barricade themselves into a secluded villa with curtained windows and eye each other suspiciously. Why has he shaved his head? How does she know he is being followed by the police? They are both now prisoners in a house without a view in the midst of a hostile environment. The voices of police can be heard in the distance, but so too can the calming sound of the sea. One time they look at the night sky full of stars before again withdrawing behind their protective walls.

Are we looking at outlaws, in all senses of the word? Or are the man and the young woman merely phantoms, figments of the imagination of a filmmaker who is no longer allowed to work? The director enters the scene and the curtains are pulled open. Reality reinstates itself, but fiction closes in on it again and again. An absurd situation: two characters from a screenplay, both searching for and observing their director. –Berlinale

Director

Jafar Panahi

Jafar Panahi (Persian: جعفر پناهی , born July 11, 1960 in Mianeh, Iran) is an Iranian filmmaker and is one of the most influential filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave movement. He has gained recognition from film theorists and critics worldwide and received numerous awards including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Jafar Panahi was ten years old when he wrote his first book, which subsequently won the first prize in a literary competition. At the same age, he became familiar with film making. He shot films on 8mm film, acting in one and assisting in the making of another. Later, he took up photography. During his military service, Panahi served in the Iran–Iraq War (1980-90) and made a documentary about the war during this period.

After studying film directing at the College of Cinema and Television in Tehran, Panahi made several films for Iranian television and was the assistant director of Abbas Kiarostami’s… read more

Jafar Panahi (Persian: جعفر پناهی , born July 11, 1960 in Mianeh, Iran) is an Iranian filmmaker and is one of the most influential filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave movement. He has gained recognition from film theorists and critics worldwide and received numerous awards including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Jafar Panahi was ten years old when he wrote his first book, which subsequently won the first prize in a literary competition. At the same age, he became familiar with film making. He shot films on 8mm film, acting in one and assisting in the making of another. Later, he took up photography. During his military service, Panahi served in the Iran–Iraq War (1980-90) and made a documentary about the war during this period.

After studying film directing at the College of Cinema and Television in Tehran, Panahi made several films for Iranian television and was the assistant director of Abbas Kiarostami’s film Through the Olive Trees (1994). Since that time, he has directed several films and won numerous awards in international film festivals.

Panahi’s first feature film came in 1995, entitled White Balloon. This film won a Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His second feature film, The Mirror, received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival.

His most notable offering to date has been The Circle (2000), which criticized the treatment of women under Iran’s Islamist regime. Jafar Panahi won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival for The Circle, which was named FIPRESCI Film of the Year at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, and appeared on Top 10 lists of critics worldwide.. Panahi also directed Crimson Gold in 2003, which brought him the Un Certain Regard Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival. During that time Panahi was detained in the JFK airport, New York, while taking a connection from Hong Kong to Montevideo, after refusing to be photographed and fingerprinted by the immigration police. After being chained and waiting for several hours, he was finally sent back to Hong Kong.

Panahi’s Offside (the story of girls who disguise themselves as boys to be able to watch a football match) was selected for competition in the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, where he was awarded with the Silver Bear (Jury Grand Prix).

On 30 July 2009, Mojtaba Saminejad, an Iranian blogger and human rights activist writing from inside Iran, reported that Panahi was arrested at the cemetery in Tehran where mourners had gathered near the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan. He was later released, but his passport was revoked and he was banned from leaving the country. In February 2010 his request to travel to the 60th Berlin Film Festival to participate in the panel discussion on “Iranian Cinema: Present and Future. Expectations inside and outside of Iran” was denied.

On 1 March 2010, Panahi was arrested again. He was taken from his home along with his wife Tahereh Saidi, daughter Solmaz Panahi and 15 of his friends by plainclothes officers and taken to the Evin Prison. Most were released 48 hours later, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mehdi Pourmoussa on 17 March 2010, but Panahi remains in ward 209 inside Evin Prison. Panahi’s arrest was confirmed by the government, but charges were not specified. Filmmakers Ken Loach, Abbas Kiarostami, Kiomars Pourahmad, Bahram Bayzai, Asghar Farhadi, Nasser Taghvai, Kamran Shirdel and Tahmineh Milani, actor Mehdi Hashemi, actresses Fatemeh Motamed-Aria and Golshifteh Farahani, Federation of European Film Directors, European Film Academy, Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema, Berlin Film Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Febiofest and Toronto Film Critics Association have called for his release. France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and minister of culture and communications Frédéric Mitterrand, German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, Canadian government and Human Rights Watch have condemned the arrest. On 8 March 2010, a group of well-known Iranian producers, directors and actors visited Panahi’s family to show their support and call for his immediate release. After more than a week in captivity, Panahi was finally allowed to call his family. On 18 March 2010 he has been allowed to have visitors, including his family and lawyer.

Panahi’s style is often described as an Iranian form of neorealism.[citation needed] Jake Wilson describes his films as connected by a “tension between documentary immediacy and a set of strictly defined formal parameters” in addition to “overtly expressed anger at the restrictions that Iranian society imposes”. His film Offside is so ensconced in the reality that it was actually filmed in part during the event it dramatizes – the Iran-Bahrain qualifying match for the 2006 World Cup. —wikipedia

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Kambuzia Partovi

Kambuzia Partovi (also spelt Kambozia Partovi, born 1955) is an Iranian filmmaker and scriptwriter. Partovi’s latest movie, Café Transit, was nominated for the Oscars at 2007 to represent Iranian cinema in the competition for the best foreign language films. He has also written screenplays for other directors, most notably The Circle by maestro Jafar Panahi. Partovi trained and supported many Iranian artists and film makers, most notably Bahman Ghobadi. —Wikipedia