- 26 May-04 June -

Here is a rare chance to see eight of the finest Iranian movies of the past twelve years.

Iran�s cinema has become one of the most vibrant and prolific cinemas in the world. As Iranian filmmakers continue to win prizes at international festivals, filmmaking has become a popular profession for young creative Iranian artists.

Hanoi Cinematheque
26 May-04 June

Iranian Film Retrospective

In cooperation with the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we will show a
glimpse life in Iran since the Revolution in 1979 through the eyes of some of
Iran�s greatest directors: Makhmalbaf, Merhjui, Majidi, Rakhshan
Bani-Etemad, and Bahman Farmanara.

Iranian cinema offers many direct insights into a complicated culture. It has
helped to break down the dominant Western images of Iran as a country of dour
oppressed women swathed in black and bearded young men chanting ”Death
to America!” More than any other medium, 30 years after the revolution
that toppled the Shah and his Western-oriented regime, Iran has a thriving film
industry even though many of the films are banned in Iran. Overcoming the
obstacles of censorship at home and suspicion abroad, these films have
increasingly been winning critical acclaim and prizes at international film
festivals. They explore with candor that often borders on bitterness the
searing social, economic and personal problems of ordinary Iranians in
post-revolutionary Iran.

Much is still taboo in Iranian cinema — women with uncovered hair, women
singing on screen or dancing, and kissing. Government censors still ban films
that they conclude openly challenge the legitimacy of the Islamic republic, of
rule by Moslem clerics and of the country’s numerous religious martyrs –
first and foremost among them, the revolution’s leader, the late Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, whose stern visage continues to adorn all Government offices
and many a private home. But as the revolution has evolved, many of the most
fundamentalist and dogmatic film censors have been replaced by younger educated
men and women who, at least by comparison with their predecessors, are more
tolerant.

In the first years after the 1979 revolution, only a few movies were made.
Filmmakers and intellectuals in general were hampered not only by the
post-revolutionary chaos and the bloody power struggle that followed the fall
of the Shah but also by the Iraqi invasion of Iran only a year after the
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had come to power.

At first, directors made films about children, often in a rural or village
setting, with a combination of sentimentality, exotica, reality and surreality.

Other, more socially and emotionally direct films explored the tensions,
restrictions and grimness of everyday life. This type deals with the gritty:
suicide, murder, war, mental illness, divorce, infertility, polygamy, tribal
oppression, unemployment, adultery, cross-dressing, social inequality,
mixed-sex parties, drug addiction, wife-beating, child abuse and, recently,
prostitution. Dariush Mehrjui’s LEILA’ (1997) with infertility and
polygamy, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad�s UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY family
dislocation in Tehran with a performance by Golab Adineh which rivals the great
Katina Paxinou�s in Visconti�s ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS.

The comedy THE SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMIN features actor/producer
Bahman Farmanara, Iran�s pudgy Woody Allen, in a funny, deadpan rumination of
his impending funeral services.

We are especially pleased to welcome the distinguished Iranian actor, Mohammad
Reza Foroutan (star of UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY) who will introduce our
opening film on Monday night, and speak with us after the screening about the
film, and about Iranian cinema in general.

Our courtyard caf� will be open from 5 pm daily, and will be serving a
selection of Persian dishes prepared by Hanoi�s Iranian Embassy chef.

And special thanks to Mrs Tran Tuong Nhu for helping to curate this series.

SCHEDULE
MAY

26 Monday
19:00 UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY
with guest Mohammad Reza Foroutan, leading actor in the film.

27 Tuesday
19:00 UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY
21:00 FATHER

28 Wednesday
19:00 FATHER
21:00 GABBEH

29 Thursday
19:00 GABBEH
21:00 LEILA

30 Friday
19:00 LEILA
21:00 THE SILENCE

31 Saturday
15:00 THE SILENCE
19:00 CHILDREN OF HEAVEN
21:00 FATHER

JUNE

1 Sunday
15:00 CHILDREN OF HEAVEN
19:00 THE SILENCE
21:00 THE COLOR OF PARADISE

2 Monday
19:00 THE COLOR OF PARADISE
21:00 SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE

3 Tuesday
19:00 SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE
21:00 A PLACE TO LIVE

4 Wednesday
19:00 THE SILENCE
21:00 A PLACE TO LIVE

FILM NOTES

UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY

2001 Directed by Rakhshan Bani Etemad 92 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio option

Audience Award and Best Screenplay Award, Torino Int�l Film Festival
Grand Jury Prize, Moscow International Film Festival

Widely regarded as the �First Lady of Iranian Cinema,� director Rakhshan
Bani Etemad�s UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY is a stirring and powerful family
drama that provides a fresh and provocative vision of Iranian urban society.

Tuba works daily at a grueling textile factory in Iran, returning home every
night to deal with the rest of her problematic family, which includes: a
pregnant daughter whose husband beats her regularly; a teenage son, who’s
been getting into trouble due to his burgeoning career in radical politics; and
an older son who goes to great lengths–such as attempting to sell the
family’s meager house–in order to get an engineering job in Japan as a
means of getting out of Iran. Unfortunately the ‘friend’ to whom he
gave his money as an advance for his trip took off with the money, and the son
finds himself without money, without a career, and with a debt towards a lot of
people. To solve his problems he wants to deliver a package of heroin, but loses

it, and has to flee. The film ends dramatically with a direct call from the
mother to the camera crew asking what life has given them after all the
sacrifices they have done, mirroring the opening scene.

�The latest example of the brilliance evident in contemporary Iranian
cinema.�
— Susan Green, Boxoffice Online

Review by Andrew O�Hehir, Salon Magazine:

�This solidly made and sometimes quite moving chronicle of a working-class
family in Tehran is nonetheless an important movie for all to see. It’s
told in a low-key semi-documentary style, by a woman director who is in fact
one of Iran’s leading documentarians. Furthermore, of all the Iranian films
I’ve seen in the last few years, UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY offers the most
searching and complicated portrait of that nation’s rapidly changing
society. It’s that society, we might add, that some of the creepy, overfed
dudes behind the scenes of United States foreign policy would like to bulldoze
and fill up with shopping malls after they get finished in Iraq.

Mind you, as director Rakhshan Bani Etemad’s consistently fascinating
journey through the gray-market work world of Tehran reveals, the malls are
already there. As in Abbas Kiarostami’s quite different but equally
worthwhile new film TEN, Tehran emerges as a city of SUV-clogged highways,
glass-fronted shopping centers and high-rise office buildings. (I suppose we
should all know that already, but I’m guessing we don’t.) Yeah, the
family in UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY lives in an older, Middle Eastern-style
stone house built around an open courtyard. But they go out to eat at an
’80s-looking pizzeria that’s straight out of suburban California,
complete with uncomfortable steel chairs and a wait staff in butt-ugly
polyester uniforms.

As a filmmaker, Bani Etemad is closer to the European “neorealists”
of the postwar period, like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, than to
the philosophical and linguistic explorations of Kiarostami, Iran’s most
famous film export. She offers the familiar neorealist mix of downbeat
melodrama and working-class domestic comedy: A long-suffering mom, an
ineffectual, puttering dad, rebellious kids with radios and motorbikes.
Overall, in fact, the social dynamic depicted here is strikingly similar to
that of Europe in the ’50s: We see a society grappling with rapid
liberalization on one hand and the resistant forces of tradition — religion,
nationalism, patriarchal family structure — on the other.�

Review by O.O. Scott, New York Times:

�There is a great deal of palpable political sentiment in this film: a quiet
disgust at the way Tuba and her co-workers are exploited; a simmering contempt
at the deeply ingrained habits of male domination; and a weary pessimism about
the fantasy of cosmopolitan affluence that Abbas finds so compelling. But Ms.
Bani-Etemad is neither hopeless nor didactic, and somehow the calamities that
befall Tuba and her children take on the purgative and redeeming force of
tragedy. The distraught mother facing the camera at the end is a figure not of
pity, but of defiance.

IMDB Public Comments:

�Rakhshan Bani Etemad’s earlier MAY LADY and NARGESS were quite
impressive, and comparatively unrecognized in the US. Still I wasn’t
expecting the startling leap in skill evidenced in UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY.
Weaving the many familial themes introduced in earlier works, Etemad broadens
her palette a bit, balancing subtle (but complex) criticism of sexual politics
in a very conservative society with broader glimpses of general social
discontent, and the manner in which that discontent can produce upheaval in
both personal and public worlds.

Weaving intricately between both (offering panoramic glimpses of Tehran which
are all the more breathtaking because of their grittiness and restless energy),
UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY centers around Tuba and her family of six - a married
daughter reeling from increasingly brutal physical abuse (which - in this
setting - is first blamed on the victim), an intelligent but increasingly
restless younger daugther, and two sons - one (the older) supporting the family
(along with his mother); the other still in high school and drifting into
radical/left political agitation (in reaction to his family’s poverty, the
degradations inflicted upon the women around him, and the plainly visible chasm
between rich and poor that this entire film turns on). The choice before the
family to to leap for upward mobility, or risk sliding farther into poverty -
but with either choice there are complications.

Throughout the film there are many stand-out moments: the opening (with
Tuba’s face, seen framed - or symbolically imprisoned - within a video
document of the world of working women), the carefully composed scenes
capturing the family home and neighborhood (reminiscent of the rather similar
BEIJING BICYCLE; with both films updating and personalizing Italian neo-realism
in spectacular fashion), and the many vibrant views of Tehran: this is a film
that manages to capture a city and culture with tremendous affection, while
still also offering articulate, tough-minded criticism - the end result is a
creatively crafted film of great emotional power.�

�I was pretty amazed when I watched this film because it was a brave look at
some of the social problems a particular family has in Iran. There are several
instances of spousal and child abuse in the film and although the lead
character takes a fatalistic view, several of her children are enraged by it. I
really enjoyed watching their daughter slug the neighbor who had been abusing
her best friend–it really felt quite satisfying to watch. In addition, there
are several societal problems (under-employment, the black market, etc.) that
are discussed as well. I am really quite surprised that a movie coming out of
Iran would take such a risk. Because of this, it is definitely worth a look.

This movie is not nearly as “pretty” as the fabulous Iranian films
THE COLOR OF PARADISE or CHILDREN OF HEAVEN, but it helps to give a very
different view of urban Iranian life.�

FATHER

1996 Directed by Majid Majidi 96 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio option

Jury Award, 1996 San Sebastian International Film Festival
Special Jury Award, 1996 Torino International Film Festival
International Jury Award, 1996 Sao Paulo International Film Festival

Another triumph for the humanistic Iranian cinema that surprised the
movie-watching world in the 1990s.

Directed by Majid Majidi, who would later helm the better known CHILDREN OF
HEAVEN, this is set in a working class milieu, and it tells the story of a
teenage boy, Mehrollah, who - after his father is killed in a traffic accident
- has to leave school and start working in order to support his family. He is
proud of being, at such a young age, the person bringing the bread to his poor
family. But things change when his widowed mother marries a police officer. He
regards this as a double betrayal, and he tries to make life for his family
impossible. After putting his two young sisters in jeopardy (in a domestic
oven, in one of the film’s best scenes), he flees to a port city.

His stepfather follows him, and in the road back they find themselves in the
desert, in a final chase scene that is beautifully and dramatically
choreographed.

Director Majid Majidi is an expert who knows how to tell a simple story with
deep meaning, with excellent camera language and very little dialogue.

GABBEH

1996 Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbah 75 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio option

Best Asian Feature Film Award, Singapore Int�l Film Festival
Best Artistic Contribution Award, Tokyo International Film Festival

GABBEH is a magical and visually stunning film set in the arid countryside of
Iran. An old man and woman have a richly colored carpet that they cherish.
Suddenly, Gabbeh, a beautiful young woman, appears before them. She has woven
the carpet and is the spirit of the carpet. Her story unspools before their
eyes.

Although this young woman is in love with a man who follows her nomadic tribe
on horseback, her stern and authoritarian father will not allow her to marry
him. Meanwhile, Gabbeh’s uncle finds the woman of his dreams. Her mother
gives birth, her little sister dies, and a goat is born. Eventually Gabbeh
defies her father and runs off with her ardent lover, who howls at the moon.

Writer and director Mohsen Makhmalbaf is an inventive fabulist who uses color,
character, fantasy, reality, and spirituality to convey the mysteries of love,
family, ritual, and creativity. This poetic and picturesque movie celebrates
the gnarled beauty of the natural world, the art of weaving, and the unique
ways that story gives life shape and meaning. Gabbeh is a sense luscious film
that stays with you long after the closing credits.

LEILA

1996 Directed by Dariush Mehrjui 102 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio option

Dariush Mehrjui is one of Iran’s finest modern filmmakers; his specialty is
making films about relationships among the upper-middle-class illuminati and
especially love stories about women. LEILA is a very powerful, poignant and
mesmerizing love story, about the pressures of dealing with Moslem traditions
and of a woman’s own sense of being.

A very warm couple, the handsome Reza (Ali Mosaffa) and the beautiful Leila
(Leila Hatami), perfectly suited for each other in temperament find happiness
in their first year of marriage, but after that, their marriage begins turning
cold. The problem comes from Leila’s overbearing mother-in-law (Jamileh
Sheikhi), a monster if there ever was one. She rattles the poor, sensitive girl
and completely intimidates her, stressing how important it is to have a son to
carry out the family name. The wealthy Reza, who works in his father’s
company, is the only son, there are four daughters. When the news from the lab
comes back that Leila is barren, that her hormonal levels are too low to ever
have children, the mother-in-law heartlessly puts the burden on her — telling
her that she is holding her son back from raising a family.

The weak son never confronts his mother as he seems perplexed, even as his wife
begins to slowly sink into a shell, confused and ashamed about herself,
unwilling to confide in anyone, not even her mother. Reza reacts by saying he
doesn’t want another wife and that he can live happily without children,
just as long as she returns to being the old playful Leila who smiles so easily
and is close to him.

This is a truly heartbreaking tale that examines a woman’s psyche, looking
carefully at her desires and her expectations.

LEILA is a very compelling and subtle film. For the Iranian filmmaker, the
situation illustrates the brutal clash between modernity and Islamic tradition
in contemporary Iran.

The world in which Reza and Leila live luxuriously is a land of superhighways,
cellular phones and modern biotechnology. But it is also a place where women
dress in black and wear chadors much of the time and where polygamy is an
accepted tradition.

It is also about the universal problem of love as seen through the psyche of a
woman who is stripped of her self-esteem and even though she is beautiful and
has a considerate husband, she is still not sure of what her role is in
society

�LEILA is, in a word, devastating.�
— Stephen Holden, NYTimes

THE SILENCE

1998 Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf 75 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

Gold Medal, 1998 Venice Film Festival

From one of Iran’s most celebrated filmmakers, comes THE SILENCE, a
hypnotic symphony of visual and aural rhythms. THE SILENCE follows the life of
Khorshid, a blind 10-year- old boy who experiences the world through sound.
Living with his mother in a small village in Tajikistan, Khorshid earns money
tuning musical instruments.

Nadereh, the beautiful young prot�g�e of the instrument maker for whom
Khorshid works, acts as his eyes, fetching him every day at the bus stop and
leading him through the streets to his destination. Sometimes on the way, a
conversation or melody attracts Khorshid’s attention and he loses himself
in the compelling harmonies of the city and everyday life.

Filled with striking scenes and hypnotic music, the production is unique and
riveting. The camera wanders through the bazaars and shops of Tajikistan
providing a glimpse into a culture not well known to Westerners. The interplay
between the boy and the beautiful young woman who acts as his eyes is touching,
filled with humor, and played with a simple elegance. The distractions
encountered by the boy on his way from home to work are a delight. Supporting
roles are well played. The harmonies of the music, the city, and everyday life
produce a funny and profound film, with exquisite imagery as well.

NOTE: THE SILENCE takes place in Tajikistan, an ex-Soviet republic consisting
mainly of ethnic Iranians with Farsi language.

Review by Wesley Morris, San Francisco Examiner:

�In THE SILENCE, Khorsid (Tahmineh Normatova) gets up every day and journeys
into the city, where he tunes instruments. The boy’s blindness has elevated
his sense of sound. Actually, his hearing is normal; his passion for music and
for natural sound is bionic. He hears “Beethoven’s Fifth” in the
world around him. Makhmalbaf crafts the boy’s world as a flip-book of
gorgeous, lyrical images - the marketplace as a wall of commercial temptations
with women and girls selling bread, a friend who hangs cherries on her ears,
those moments during Khorsid’s bus rides when he covers one ear so the
other can concentrate.

A lot of this is like Fellini - without the pageantry. Rather than using
surrealism for spectacle’s sake, the way Fellini sometimes did, Makhmalbaf
sees audiovisual magic as an alloy, which stretches the bounds of the
naturalism he is using in the name of a purely sensory experience.�

�A fascinating, gorgeous film. One stunning, beautifully composed image
follows another.�
— Jonathan Foreman, New York Post

�Radiantly sensuous�
— Stephen Holden, New York Times

CHILDREN OF HEAVEN

1997 Directed by Majid Majidi 95 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio option

Academy Award Nomination, Best Foreign Language Film, 1997
Grand Prize, Montreal World Film Festival
Best Asian Feature Award, Singapore International Film Festival

Review by Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle:

Haunting in its charm, CHILDREN OF HEAVEN opens a window on both contemporary
Tehran and the hopeful heart of childhood.

This lovely, amusing film deserves a big audience — especially families. It
touches on the innocence of children with tremendous affection.

Though in Farsi, CHILDREN OF HEAVEN�s English subtitles should pose no
problems for young audiences. The movie, which opens today at Opera Plaza
Cinema, is so telling in matter-of-fact visuals that subtitles are hardly
needed.

Starring a cast of nonactors assembled by Iranian writer-director Majid Majidi
(“The Father”), CHILDREN OF HEAVEN tells the story of Ali (Mir
Farrokh Hashemian), a sad-eyed schoolboy who loses his little sister’s
just-repaired shoes.

Ali is the son of impoverished parents, and the family lives in Tehran’s
poor southern section. The loss of something so basic as a pair of shoes could
be a bitter financial setback for them, and both Ali and his patient, adoring
sister, Zahra (Bahareh Seddiqi), know it.

The sister is willing to believe that her brother might somehow recover the
shoes, so she reluctantly goes along with his plan to hide the predicament from
their parents. Ali and Zahra agree to share Ali’s beat- up sneakers. Though
a size too big, Zahra wears them to school in the morning, then trades them
back to Ali at a prearranged meeting place so the brother can wear them to
school in the afternoon. The plan works OK, but there are hitches.

The story is presented in a great wash of the everyday. Director Majidi
heightens innocence and vulnerability as he trains the camera on the kids,
barely noticed in fascinating, sprawling, contemporary Tehran. As innocents,
they are shining examples of humanity in an impersonal world.

The film also depicts their tight- knit family. The father (Amir Naji) seeks
work as a handyman, but his life really centers on the local mosque. The film
makes no judgments about religion — it’s just part of life in a Muslim
city. The mother (Fereshteh Sarabandi) is nursing a baby, but she’s
disabled by a serious back condition.

Western viewers rarely get to see everyday life in Iran and, filmed in
documentary style, CHILDREN OF HEAVEN provides an entrancing look while also
presenting a heartrending story of tenderness and childlike determination. In
scenes reminiscent of Vittorio De Sica’s THE BICYCLE THIEF Ali accompanies
his father to look for work in Tehran’s cloistered, wealthy suburb. The
family’s luck improves slightly.

But the film’s loveliest touch is Ali’s attempt to win for his sister a
new pair of shoes, third prize in a grueling running race. Ali seems to be the
fastest runner in Tehran, but he must make sure that he comes in only third.
It’s a lot harder than he imagined — and a real test of love.�

Review by Michael Thomson, BBC London:

�Watching creative intelligence extract quality work from real people (ie
non-actors) is always a pleasure. In lesser hands, non-actors on screen just
wander about, looking idiotically self-conscious or hamming it up at every
available opportunity. Just the way, in fact, you behaved on holiday when your
embarrassment of a father wanted to take a snap. At what point, then, do
non-actors, under the control of a director, become actors?

Certainly the youngsters in CHILDREN OF HEAVEN respond well to the direction of
Majid Majidi and give off emotions and thoughts in such an unmannered way that
many proper actors could learn loads. Which also partially explains why this
Iranian film was also up for an Oscar, only to be beaten to the finish by
“Life Is Beautiful”.

Realistic to its core, CHILDREN OF HEAVEN is also set on city locations, all
picked to reflect the poverty of the brother and sister, as well as the yawning
chasm between rich and poor. As nine-year-old Ali feels guilty at losing his
sister’s shoes and arranges for her to borrow his trainers, small moments
often reveal big truths.�

THE SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE

2000 Directed by Bahman Farmanara 93 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio option

Banned from making films for over twenty years by Iran’s Post-Revolutionary
Censor Board, Bahman Farmanara returns with SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF
JASMINE, a deeply inspiring meditation on existence and death. Farmanara plays
Bahman Farjami, a director in his mid-50s who continues to mourn his recently
deceased wife. While driving to visit her grave one morning, he picks up a
distraught young woman, who turns out to be carrying a stillborn child with
her. When he gets to the graveyard, the day quickly turns worse. It appears
that a mix-up has occurred and the plot Bahman has reserved for himself,
adjacent to his wife’s grave, has been mistakenly occupied. Distraught and
confused, Bahman visits his doctor only to discover that if he doesn’t quit
smoking cigarettes, he won’t be living much longer. To try to make sense of
his demise and the effect it will have on those closest to him, Bahman decides
to stage and film his own funeral. But when the morning comes to shoot the !
morbid recreation, it appears that his own time has come, sparking a
realization that teaches Bahman a powerful lesson once and for all. Deftly
incorporating his own experiences, Farmanara’s personal essay reverberates
with a sincerity that most films never achieve.

�This beautifully made film is a remarkable combination of dry wit and a
sense of lonely desperation. We get deep beneath the skin of the central
character as he goes through this dark period in his life, never losing his
sense of humour in his interactions with others, right up to the moment when he
sees his own funeral and cries “Cut!” because everything is wrong. The
title refers to scents that guide his memories–camphor is applied to corpses,
jasmine reminds him of his youth. And while the whole thing is indeed fairly
dull and dark, it is so lovely and provocative that it can’t help but spark
our imaginations, emotions and memories.
— Review by Rich Cline

� A cross between Bergman and Fellini with a touch of deadpan humor thrown in�
— Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

� An Iranian Woody Allen!�
— Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

THE COLOR OF PARADISE

1999 Directed by Majid Majidi 90 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

�Another gem to spring from one of the world’s most vital national cinemas.�
—- Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times:

“Quick and gentle, in love with knowledge, acutely attuned to the world
around him, Mohammad loves his lessons at a school for the blind. He is loved
at home by his grandmother and his two sisters. But his father, Hashem, does
not love him. Hashem is a widower, ambitious to marry into a prosperous family,
and he fears the possession of a blind son will devalue him in the marriage
market.

For all of its apparent melodrama, THE COLOR OF PARADISE is not an obvious or
manipulative film. It is too deliberately simple. And it is made with delicacy
and beauty. The soundtrack is alive with natural sounds of woodpeckers,
birdsongs, insects and nature, voices and footfalls. A blind person would get a
good idea of the locations and what is happening–as Mohammad does. The
performance by young Mohsen Ramezani, as the boy, is without guile; when he
cries once in frustration, we do not see acting, but raw grief.

The ending, after a sequence in which the boy is in great danger, will strike
some as contrived. Certainly it is not subtle by our cynical Western standards.
If Hollywood told this story, the father would have a change of heart. In Iran,
heaven intervenes more directly–as if God, having tested Mohammad as much as
he dares, has the change of heart himself.

A PLACE TO LIVE

2003 Directed by Mohammad Bozorgnia 121 minutes
Farsi with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

A rare opportunity to see an Iranian film that was made for the domestic market
only, and never shown abroad.

The outbreak of war has devasting effects in Eidee Mohammad�s big family, as
all of their belongings have fall into the hands of enemy forces.

Fear, hope, resistance and love change the destinies of all the family members.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE
Hanoi’s unique ‘art-house cinema’, is a members-only film society.

Memberships are available at the box office for only 100,000VND per year.

Members receive regular emails with detailed schedules and reviews of the films.

Tickets to the films are by donation.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE 22A Hai Ba Trung Street (at the end of the alley leading to Artist’s Hotel) RESERVATIONS: Tel: 936 2648 (14:00 - 20:00) Fax: 936 2649 Email: info2@hanoicinema.or CAFE CINEMATHEQUE from 17:00 weekdays and from 13:30 weekends.