Shirin Neshat showed "Women Without Men"
This is a copy of the article I published on Filmaster: Tofifest Review: Shirin Neshat showed "Women Without Men". It's licenced on Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License so you can copy it anywhere as long as you link back to Filmaster.com.
Written by: Borys Musielak
Contemporary Iranian artist Shirin Neshat was a special guest on Tofifest International Film festival where she presented "Women Without Men" in ON AIR contest. Shirin, who currently lives in New York, was awarded a Silver Lion in Venice last year for her debut feature. After the screening, a meeting on stage with the director and her husband and screenwriter Shoja Azari was arranged and I managed to videotape some of their answers.
"Women Without Men" tells a story of four women of Iran at a turning point of their lives. The wife of a high ranking army officer leaves him to buy a garden out of town and live there in silence. The sister of a traditional Muslim, more into politics than relationships, cannot agree to be married to a random man presented to her (she's thirty and still without a husband!) and eventually joins a communist group. Her female friend on the other hand is in love with her brother, but after being raped by two men in the middle of the day, she escapes, ashamed and finds shelter in the first woman's garden. There, she meets a prostitute who has fled brother after seeing a client turning into a zombie (possibly in her dream).
The movie was filmed in Casablanca, Morocco, as the directing pair has been banned in their home country for many years. All the events in the movie have a political background. The action is set in the year 1953 in Iran, in the middle of the United States and United Kingdom inspired revolution that overthrew the democratically elected government and replaced it with a dictatorship. The subject has, surprisingly, not been common in Iranian cinema, partially because of the censorship and partially because the wounds are still fresh and the events still remain a taboo in the country.
Why is the movie so political? - someone asked. Shirin explained that the reason is simple: Any artist with an Iranian soul cannot escape the politics as it defines the way people live and behave.
But politics is still only a background in "Women Without Men". An essential one, but still a background. Neshat is not interested in politics alone, but rather in the way it affects ordinary people, especially women as they are the main characters in her film and other art. She's interested in women's choices and their drama in a world that restricts them and forces them to live in a way they neither understand nor approve of.
Shirin's film is very poetic. It can be placed in a basket called "magical realism," as many scenes can and should be interpreted as metaphors and we really never know which parts of the movie are actually happening and which ones are a visualisation of the rich imagination of the characters.
It makes sense to compare "Women Without Men" with another politically engaged Iranian drama from last year, "No One Knows About Persian Cats" which I reviewed in April. Neshat's film is by far more professional and aesthetically pleasing. Cinematography, editing and the music selected perfectly match making the film very coherent. It becomes obvious after you learn that she spend 6 years making this film with her husband, as opposed to the 17 days that took Bahman Ghobadi to make his. But both movies share the same climax of nostalgia after the old democratic Iran and both show a strong belief that the change in Iran will be bottom-up and that change is inevitable as the young people's attitudes have altered already.
"Women Without Men" is artistic cinema at its finest. It asks crucial questions. It's also lyrical but doesn't cross the line into sentimentality.
I'm looking forward to the next feature film of Shirin Neshat, especially now that she has revealed it's going to be an adaptation of an Albanian novel and will most likely take place somewhere in Eastern Europe, which in terms of history and the attitudes of people "shares the most" with the people of Iran.
B.M.
PS. In one of the unrecorded answers Shirin talked about the reception of her movie in her home country. It's obviously officially banned as the government labeled it "inappropriate", but the film is widely known in Iran thanks to... piracy. Shirin officially thanked "the young computer-literate people of Iran" for spreading the film on illegal copies all over the country, sharing a funny story of her sister who managed to watch the film one day before its official premiere in the United States, after purchasing five copies on a local bazaar.
And here are the three videos I made while Shirin was talking on the stage:
- Shirin explains why she betrayed photography with film: http://www.youtube.com/v/LAy9wm0--hc&fs=1
- Shirin about film locations: http://www.youtube.com/v/z6Gm5JrzD-E&fs=1
- Shirin about poetry and politics in her art: http://www.youtube.com/v/RWYwAs7ChWw&fs=1
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