By Peter Keough

The power of cinema persists at the Boston Festival of Films from Iran

The Boston Festival of Films from Iran. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 17 through February 7.

Despite being a pariah among nations and a brutal oppressor of its own people, Iran for more than four decades could boast of one of the world’s most vibrant and vital cinemas. That may change as the paranoid and draconic regime ruling the country struggles to maintain its authority by persecuting and incarcerating some of its most creative and talented citizens.

Take, for example, the filmmakers represented in this year’s edition of the Boston Festival of Films from Iran. Of those, almost all are either in exile or awaiting trial for concocted crimes against the state.

A scene from Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of a Sacred Fig.

Mohammad Rasoulof, director of the festival opener The Seed of a Sacred Fig (2024; screens January 17 at 7 p.m. at the MFA), shot that film in secret and had to make a harrowing escape from Iran to an unknown future after fleeing an eight-year prison sentence, including possible flogging.

His film, reviewed previously in the Arts Fuse, is about an investigator in the prosecutor’s office who profits from his new position, though it draws him deeper into compromises with his ethics. Countering his decline into collaboration with the powers of evil and injustice is the growing resistance of his wife and daughters. Here, as is often the case, women lead the way in what seems a hopeless battle against a toxic patriarchal authority.

But Mehran Modiri got off considerably easier with his film on a similar subject, 6 in the Morning (2024; screens February 7 at 7 p.m. at the MFA). Here graduate student Sara (Samira Hassanpour) is scheduled, at the titular hour, to take a flight from Tehran to Toronto where she hopes to fulfill her dream of studying for a degree in philosophy. What’s disrupting her plans? Her best friend has browbeaten her into attending a farewell party at the last minute. Sara’s anxiety and annoyance (and the viewer’s) intensify as inebriated toasts are repeated, pizza is delivered (shades of Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold), and various musicians perform until a flamenco sing-along arouses the neighbors who call in the morality police.

At this point the film devolves into a slow-burn version of Dog Day Afternoon (1975), involving complications which could well have been avoided had Sara shown some common sense and backbone and resisted the importunities of those imposing on her — not least the ludicrous strictures of Iranian patriarchal tyranny. Still, the film is a tough takedown of the hypocrisy, absurdity, and inequity of the regime, so it is surprising that its release was permitted without trouble.

A scene from Mehran Modir’s 6 in the Morning

Modiri, who in 2022 was banned from leaving the country after he condemned the police murder of the demonstrator Mahsa Amini, might have escaped repercussions in this case because of his longtime popularity as an Iranian TV and film director, performer, and personality. Or maybe it was because all of the women have their hair covered with hijabs — a fetish of the Iranian leadership that is enforced with murderous authority.

Not so lucky in this regard were Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, directors of the seemingly innocuous, bittersweet late-life romance My Favourite Cake (2024; screens January 24 at 7 p.m. at the MFA). In it Lili (Farhadpour Mahin), a widow of 30 years, celebrates her 70th birthday with a bevy of her old friends. They exchange small talk about maladies, tell randy stories, and chide Mahin for never remarrying. Later her children, who long ago moved out of the country, call her to wish her happy birthday, and are gone. Despite her comfortable, well-appointed home, Mahin realizes that she is alone with little purpose in her life. No wonder she sleeps every day until noon.

On the other hand, she is a resourceful, empathetic, thoroughly sweet woman, as the film’s title might suggest, and the opposite of, say, Pansy in Mike Leigh’s new movie Hard Truths. One day while eating lunch at a pensioners café she overhears a conversation revealing that one of the customers, an elderly taxi driver named Faramarz (Ismaeel Mehrabi), is as lonely and depressed as herself. So she sets out to — not to put too fine a word on it — seduce him. He drives her home, she invites him in, and they have a great time, joking, reminiscing, drinking wine, even restoring the lights in Mahin’s old garden (metaphor alert). The potential to be cloying is there, but the filmmakers avoid sentimentality, putting together a touching parable of love, perseverance, and pathos with restraint, wit, subtlety, and exquisite taste.

But they could not avoid offending the authorities. True, there are issues with this film that might be considered subversive by a puritanical, fascist regime. Not least is the whole premise of a woman asserting herself in a romantic relationship, or the scene in which Mahin confronts a squad of morality police seizing some young women in the park for improper attire. But there is nothing in it any more controversial than can be found in the officially approved 6 in the Morning.

With one exception — Mahin has her head uncovered. Directors Moghadam and Sanaeeha were arrested, had their passports confiscated, and were banned from making films. Sanaeeha recounts in an interview last month with the Guardian the pair faced charges that its movie was “propaganda against the regime … spreading prostitution and libertinism.” All nonsense, as Sanaeeha points out in another Guardian interview. “The main issue was always the hijab,” he says.

A scene from Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet.

Farahnaz Sharifi’s poetic memoir My Stolen Planet (2024; screens February 1 at 2:30 p.m. at the MFA) makes clear just how seriously the Iranian government takes the matter of this “square meter of fabric,” as she calls it. In the film, Sharifi recalls that she was born in 1979, in the midst of the revolution that overthrew the Shah and established the Ayatollah. Women who supported the movement, seeing it as a fight for liberation, were betrayed when they were demoted to noncitizens and forced to wear hijabs. Even as a child, Sharifi resisted the imposition of the head covering, wearing it only when outside in public but discarding it (contrary to the law) as soon as she returned to the safety of her home. There she enjoyed a separate life on her own “planet” among family and friends.

Sharifi tells her story through old super 8 clips, archival material, and recent phone footage, relating how she started making movies and became obsessed with shooting everything. She was kind of like the protagonist in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1979 film Camera Buff, resisting oppression by recording its effects. Later, she grew obsessed with collecting the home movies jettisoned by those who fled Iran, images of families having fun doing things forbidden by the regime. But as demonstrations against government policies regarding the hijab became deadly — especially following the murder of Amini in 2022 — she recognized the value of cellphone cameras. She and countless others filmed images of atrocities and uploaded them to the internet.

Despite it all, Sharifi refused to leave Iran, determined to preserve her own “planet” and its world of friendships, family, and covert work. But while in Berlin for an artist residency many of her friends were arrested, her home was raided, and her archive of old images was confiscated. She realized then that her planet was no more and she did not return.

Perhaps reflecting Iran’s war on its own artists, one of the films in the festival is not even by an Iranian. Universal Language (2024; screens January 31 at 7 p.m. at the MFA) is the creation of Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin. It offers up an alternative universe in which Winnipeg, Manitoba is a fusion of that frigid Canadian city and Tehran. Thus many of the characters are Iranian, the culture and commerce a kind of pidgin Persian, and the language Farsi with occasional forays into French.

Rankin’s shaggy dog story involves a former resident of Winnipeg leaving an alternative, separatist Quebec to visit his mother back home only to discover that the old family residence has been taken over by an Iranian family. Or maybe the story is about two children who are trying to retrieve a 500 rial banknote frozen in the ice so they can buy a new pair of glasses for a fellow student who had his stolen by a turkey, a premise reminiscent of such Iranian children’s classics as Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? — minus the turkey.

A scene from Universal Language. Photo courtesy of Best Friend Forever

In addition to Iranian cinema, Rankin’s delightful sui generis gem also evokes a number of filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki and, of course, Winnipeg’s own master of deadpan absurdity and trenchant humanity, Guy Maddin. Remarkably, this kaleidoscope of weirdness and seeming loose ends ties together in an astonishing conclusion. The theme might be best expressed by the film’s opening invocation, which changes the requisite Iranian cinema tagline of  “In the name of Allah” to the more humanist “In the name of friendship.”

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).