11 THE MUSLIM WORLD
The Wind Will Carry Us Abbas Kiarostami (1999) Iran
Wadjda Haifaa Al Mansour (2012) Saudi Arabia
Al Mansour, Haifaa. Wadjda; a Sony Pictures Classics release ; Razor Film in co-production with High Look Group and Rotana Studios, in cooperation with Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk ; produced by Roman Paul, Gerhard Meixner ; Culver City, Calif. :Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2014.
Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran in 1940 and died in 2016 in Paris. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Tehran and worked as a traffic cop. He began making films in 1970. His first film, called Bread and Alley features a young boy and a dog. Like other neorealist directors, Kiarostami uses non-professional actors, and sometimes real people playing themselves on screen, as part of a fictional story.
In 1978, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown, and Teheran, which was a wealthy, cosmopolitan city became part of a Shia Theocracy under the Ayatollah Khomeini. Kiarostami made the decision to stay in Iran and to continue to work within the restraints of conservative Islam which largely forbids representational or figurative artwork.
Kiarostami’s films are made for an international audience to see Iran a country that is closed off from much of the world.
In The Wind Will Carry Us, a television crew from Teheran travels to a Kurdish village in an ancient city built into the side of a mountain. They are there to film a funerary rite, where friends of a person who died injure themselves to show their grief. In the film, the filmmaker is waiting for a local person to die. But as he waits, Kiarostami captures the life in this remote village.
Kiarostami’s films, which are often centered around children and poor Iranians living in rural areas, were not seen as overtly political, so he was allowed to work under an extremely oppressive regime. He made forty-eight films in his career.
A Taste Of Cherry won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998. In this film, the protagonist is planning to commit suicide and is trying to find someone to bury him. His filmmaking style is considered minimalist because it involves long takes. Many of these takes happen in cars as the protagonist drives in and out of Teheran.
New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott wrote that Kiarostami, “in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema. He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk.”[1]
WOMEN AND ISLAM
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was established in 1932 on 830,000 square miles on the Arabian Peninsula. It’s almost four times the size of Texas, with 34.2 Million People. It is the second largest Arab Country, second to Algeria. It is a totalitarian dictatorship, financed by oil, and governed by the conservative Wahabi sect of Sunni Islam. It is the second largest oil producer, second to the United States. Oil was discovered in 1938 and turned this theocracy into a global military power. The capital is Riyadh, the home of the Saud Family.
Saudi Arabia is also the home of the two holiest cities of Islam: Mecca and Medina.
Mecca, the Holiest City of Islam, is the birthplace of Muhammed. The Koran was revealed to Muhammed by Allah in the cave of Hira. The Great Mosque is believed to be built by Abraham and Ishmael of the Old Testament. Practicing Muslim people must travel to Mecca to participate in the Hajj. They circle around a Kaaba, the holiest site in Islam, at the center of the Masjid Al Haram, the great Mosque.
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is also a holy site for Islam. It’s where Mohammed ascended into heaven. It’s 900 miles from Jerusalem to Mecca, a long voyage, but interestingly linked by three major historical religious figures, Mohammed, Abraham and Ishmael.
Wadjda tells a neo-realist story about a normal girl growing up in a very oppressive society. The director, Haifaa Al- Mansour, had to film inside a van when she was outside on the streets of Riyadh. It is the first feature film from Saudi Arabia, a country with no movie theatres, where film is prohibited. Mansour worked within the confines of Saudi culture so that she could produce a film in her own country. In the end, the Saudi government supported her and submitted the film to festivals as the first Saudi Arabian film
- Scott, A.O. FILM REVIEW; Finding the Beauty of Life In a Rural Corner of Iran, New York Times, September 28th, 2000. ↵