Permission tells the story of Afrooz, the captain of Iran's National Futsal Team, who is stopped from joining her team at the Asia Cup Final because of the last minute whim of her estranged husband.
Iiro Rantala: My Finnish Calendar (ACT)
You can’t question Javaad Alipoor’s ambition.
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian society, the myths of the theocracy that can’t, and don’t conform with the realities of human life. But there’s something wider as well, almost Dickensian, as the director presents his varied cast as players in a big city drama in which the Iranian capital itself becomes a protagonist, an entity bubbling with life, most of it “not conforming to Islamic virtues”.
But what otherwise might end up as a piece of dark realism, thanks to its technique becomes a varied and somehow irrepressible viewing experience. The film’s use of rotoscoping – it was shot by Austrian cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, who filmed live images that were redrawn by computer animation into visual forms – gives it a remarkable fluidity and lightness. It also has the undoubted advantage, for a film made in Europe by a longterm exile form Iran, of giving its participants anonymity; location shooting in Tehran would clearly have been impossible, but the drawn street scenes we see here are a creative reinterpretation that absorbs us no less.
The immediate consolation that 'Tehran Taboo' offers is aesthetic
Animation also surely offers a different level of engagement for viewers than strict realism; while the result is not exactly sanitised, it certainly has us perceiving what we see – which is frequently difficult or painful material – in a different light, though critique is never lost. A decade ago, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis gave a somewhat similar glimpse into an earlier generation of Iranian society, while this summer Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner revealed the oppressions of a girl’s life in Taliban-controlled Kabul.
Soozandeh’s opening scene certainly gives a hint of what is to come, as we witness a taxi-driver bargain with his passenger for sex, the difference here being that the prostitute concerned, Pari (Elmira Rafizadeh), has her five-year-old son, Elias, in the back seat, a (literally) mute witness to everything going on around him. Then, their business bathetically underway, the driver catches sight of his daughter walking with a man he doesn’t know, and launches into a tirade at her lack of respect for the codes of society.
That hypocrisy, covering the male half of the population and its almost total control over women’s lives, is indicative. Pari has a drug-addict husband in prison, but her divorce can’t proceed until he signs the papers. Her appeal to a Revolutionary Court judge is met with the counter proposal that she become his concubine, and he sets her up in an apartment (pictured above, the judge, Pari, Elias). The neighbours there are a respectable family – though there’s male hypocrisy there, too – and a friendship grows between Pari and Sara (Zara Amir Ebrahimi), the daughter-in-law of the house, while Elias comes to feel at home in both apartments.
But even in that secure, cultured family environment, Sara’s life is heavily restricted: she can’t take a job without written permission from her husband, who expects her to stay home and prepare for the birth of their child. While Pari seems to have an invincibility that makes her able to resist everything that fate throws at her – her heavy make-up is both disguise and protection – Sara is more vulnerable. The sense of the bonding between these two women from very different worlds is the best thing in Tehran Taboo, caught in a lovely scene where they go out for a meal, unaccompanied by men (pictured below).
A third story strand, about a young musician, Babak (Arash Marandi), starts separately, before it gradually enmeshes with the world of the two women. Babak belongs to the underground music world, where clubs provide a place of release for the otherwise restrained energy of the young. Relaxing after playing at a rave, he encounters Donya (Negar Mona Alizadeh); encouraged by pills, the two have uninhibited sex. Hardly what you expect of life in Iran? Perhaps. What follows is, however, when she tells him the next day that she is about to be married, and needs to have her virginity restored for her husband-to-be. So begins a frantic search – the fact that Babak acknowledges his responsibility is the only time a man behaves nobly here – which takes in everything from black-market, Chinese-made hymen restorers to the sleaziest depths of under-the-counter surgery. (Pictured below, Babak and Dounya)
At every stage in Soozandeh’s saga, whenever his characters encounter authority, their only remedy is corruption: the only way life can be ameliorated in so nominally strict a society is bribery. Authority, and the absurdity of its tenets, ends up mocked in the form of anecdote, to which it responds by bringing punishment into the open: we witness a public hanging. It’s a society so controlling that escape appears the only option, if you're lucky enough to be able to arrange that. But flight comes in different forms… 
Strange though it may sound, the immediate consolation that Tehran Taboo offers is aesthetic. The chaos of Tehran’s street world is something viewers know from contemporary Iranian cinema (not least Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran: the somewhat episodic nature of Soozandeh’s film, landmarked by recurring photographer’s images, recalls that work), but animation presents it all in a different light. The sheer range of colours – the yellow of the city air, the green of dawn, the red neon roof light that marks one key location – are somehow hues of comfort. The brushwork with which Tehran Taboo draws both its characters and visual world is beautiful, but it’s only the ebullience of the latter that overcomes the desperation of the former.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Tehran Taboo
The journalist Frank Gardner has turned to fiction to illuminate with imagination the world that he knows inside out from years of reporting. His biographical trajectory, from scholar of the Middle East and the Arab world, through BBC correspondent in the region – he was shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, which left him confined to a wheelchair – has given rise to a riveting memoir, Blood & Sand, as well as a previous thriller, Crisis.
Fox is very keen to stress that Deep State is the first original production by its Europe & Africa division, the most obvious sign of which is that none of it was shot in New York or LA. But it has clearly been designed as a sleek international thriller with bags of export potential (it’s already being sold in the US and Europe, and series two is in the works), a kind of Jason Bourne-meets-The Night Manager.
"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of Manhattan, the structural is personal.
Inversion may not be the catchiest of titles, but in the case of Iranian director Behnam Behzadi’s film its associations are multifarious. On the immediate level it refers to the “thermal inversion” that generates the smogs that engulf his location, Tehran, and also direct his story. Meteorologically, the phenomenon happens when a layer of warm air sits over one of cold, preventing it from rising, and trapping pollutants in the atmosphere.
But there’s surely a deeper relevance in this story of family conflict – in particular sibling antagonism – that relates to the position of women in Iranian society, how their assertions of independence can be easily blocked by the society (and not only by the men) that surrounds them. The stand-off in the Earth’s atmosphere compares, at least loosely, with the human oppositions that Behzadi depicts in his film.
It details the struggles to negotiate the variety of complications that life throws up
However, its opening depicts a world in which women are existing rather comfortably on their own terms. Niloofar (Sahar Dolatshahi) lives with her mother Mahin (Shirin Yazdanbakhsh): she is the youngest child, and remains unmarried, while her older brother and sister have their own families. It’s not that she looks after the older woman, who lives a busy and independent life which is curtailed only by her health problems. When the Tehran smog is heavy, Niloofar tries to prevail on her mother to stay at home; the latter insists, almost skittishly, that as long as she has her medicine and oxygen with her, all will be well.
It’s a middle-class environment that allows Niloofar to live an independent life, running the tailoring business that belonged to her late father: she has developed it over more than a decade, and has further plans for expansion. There appear to be no restrictions in her professional world and, unknown to her family, she has renewed contact with a childhood friend who has returned to Tehran from abroad, and their interaction is beginning to look like they are dating. Again, it’s a process in which Niloofar is an equal player.
When the inevitable happens, and Mahin ends up in hospital, all that looks set to change. The doctor’s prognosis is uncompromising: Mahin must leave Tehran, or the consequences will be fatal. There isn’t so much a family conclave, as a decision, without discussion, by the two married siblings that Niloofar will accompany her, leaving her life and work in Tehran behind. “No husband, no children, so I don’t count?” is her retort, as the family encounters become increasingly confrontational (not least when her brother simply shuts her out of her work premises, to pay off his own debts). The older sister sees it as no less of a transaction: in return for going with the mother, Niloofar will receive an allowance. (Sahar Dolatshahi with Ali Mosaffa, playing her brother, pictured above)
Yet these loyalties aren’t quite so one-sided. Niloofar’s teenage niece Saba (Setareh Hosseini) implicitly takes the side of her aunt (she can see how her own future might develop). The possibilities of the burgeoning romantic attachment may be tested when certain other dependencies are revealed, but such difficulties can be negotiated (it involves a great deal of to-and-froing on the Tehran mobile network). And, as the matriarch begins to recover she reveals a keener will than anyone had anticipated.
The elements of drama are strong, and give the film’s closely observed scenes – even when a touch of melodrama slips in, Inversion is still very much a work of realism – their power. It premiered at Cannes last year in the “Un Certain Regard” programme, and the quality of the acting impresses profoundly. Dolatshahi has a paradoxical combination of composure and vulnerability, and her face captivates the camera: she’s matched by the utterly natural Hosseini, the youngest presence on the screen, as well as by the scheming siblings, unsympathetic but still somehow understandable. Such a keen definition of character more than compensates for a budget we assume was modest. (Romantic interest: Sahar Dolatshahi with Ali Reza Aghakhani, pictured above)
Inversion doesn’t quite fit into the arthouse strand of Iranian cinema that is best known in the West (and it certainly doesn’t belong to the mainstream that dominates the country’s film industry). Possibly, at home, it falls into what's called the “popular art” genre, and its concerns – detailing the struggles to negotiate the variety of complications that life throws up – are close to those of Asghar Farhadi’s recent The Salesman. Both deal with the consequences of a settled life being disrupted. Though European realism might also be another point of reference, Behzadi’s brisk conclusion consciously leaves any such allegiance behind – in a way that feels more accomplished cinematically than it does thematically.
To say that a film opens up a world to us may seem a double-edged compliment. After all, why should we be surprised to recognise patterns of life in Tehran as somehow familiar – even if we think of Iran as “closed” in some way? Surprisingly, I’m drawn to comparisons with Jon Snow’s broadcasts for Channel 4 this week on the Iranian elections, which conveyed something, however briefly, of what life there, in all its contradictions, may be like. For almost an hour-and-a-half Inversion anchors us in Behzadi’s here-and-now. It is no small achievement.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Inversion
"Attention must be paid," we are famously told near the close of Death of a Salesman. And so it was this year on Oscar night when Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi won his second Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (A Separation was the first), this time for a movie that leans heavily on Arthur Miller's classic – though whether as crutch or inspiration will remain for individual viewers
A welcome antidote to the mood of a time which seems hell-bent on closing borders and building walls, The Music of Strangers is about a unique musical collective that breaks through division and reaffirms the potential of culture to unite. Subtitled “Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble”, Morgan Neville’s film is about the band that came into being at the beginning of the millennium on the initiative of the great Chinese-American cellist, giving us snapshots from its history, as well as the stories of some of its many and varied members.
It focuses on the lives of these individuals of diverse cultural achievement and inquisitive intelligence, who came together from a variety of backgrounds in the exploratory spirit of music. Ma brought its first players together in 2000 as part of his own interest in going beyond his career as a soloist: it drew on musicians from countries along the eponymous ancient trading route which for centuries had connected East and West – among them Syria, Iran and China, players from which are featured here. Neville’s film opens with an impromptu open-air jam session on a waterside square in Istanbul, and it’s that city more than any other which embodies the coming-together of two worlds.
Culture overlaps with politics at every turn
There can’t be any absolute qualifications for joining though, and subsequent members have appeared by recommendation, almost as friends of friends, like Cristina Pato, an irrepressible presence in the group who’s a master of the Galician bagpipe, the gaita. She is one of the four musicians Neville follows back to their points of origin. Cristina is much concerned with the continuity of Galicia’s traditional culture, while Wu Man, a virtuoso of the pipa, the Chinese lute, explores the disappearing traditions of the remote regions of her native land.
Culture overlaps with politics at every turn: Man is from the first post-Cultural Revolution generation of Chinese musicians (she featured in the 1980 Oscar-winning From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China, a loose cross-cultural documentary predecessor to this film). Kayhan Kalhor, player of the kamancheh, the Persian spiked fiddle, escaped the Iranian revolution in 1979, and his continuing engagement with his homeland is complicated. Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh is cut off for the moment from his Damascus past: one of the film's many moving sequences shows him engaging children at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan in music (pictured below).
Bringing it all together is the irrepressible Ma, born in Paris, transplanted at an early age to America – we see his performance as a seven-year-old at the Kennedy White House, introduced by Leonard Bernstein, whose own search for a universal music language has surely proved an ongoing inspiration. Since then he has grown into an impish maestro, whose sense of fun suggests he doesn’t take life quite as seriously as he does art. The cellist himself isn’t the film’s main subject by any means, but The Music of Strangers offers insights into the demands made of any high-profile musician: for Ma, every journey he takes, even within America, involves an element of cultural diplomacy. He reckons he has been away from home, on tour, for roughly 22 of the 35 years of his married life: his son grew up assuming his father worked at Boston’s Logan airport, so frequently did he travel there.
We don't learn everything here, never quite seeing how the Ensemble actually works, whether through genuine jazz-style group improvisation, or if a composer or conductor sometimes plays a more decisive role. Best-known for his Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom about the world of backing musicians, Neville’s last film Best of Enemies, about the Gore Vidal-William F Buckley 1968 television debates, was certainly tighter, but The Music of Strangers plays engagingly on the inevitably picaresque nature of its subject (camerawork and editing are outstanding). We may get only a glimpse into this “Manhattan Project of music”, but it’s an energetic – and energising – journey, one that reveals much, in the broadest sense, about origins, destinations, and where we may belong.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Music of Strangers