This is a 13" x 26" Italian locandina poster for the 1987
film Where is the Friend's Home? written and directed by Abbas
Kiarostami and starring Babek Ahmed Poor as Ahmed. Plot summary: When
he is about to begin his homework, Ahmed realizes he has mistakenly
brought home a notebook belonging to a classmate Mohamed Reza
Nematzadeh [Ahmed Ahmedpour]. Ahmed knows he must get his classmate's
notebook back to him to keep him from getting expelled, so he tries to
find out where he lives. His time is limited and the task is
difficult.
Cast and crew: Abbas Kiarostami, Babak Ahmed Poor, Ahmed Ahmed
Poor, Kheda Barech Defai, Iran Outari, Ait Ansari, Sadika Taohidi,
Biman Mouafi, Ali Djamali, Aziz Babai, Nader Ghoulami, Akbar Mouradi,
Taba Slimani, Mohammad Reza Parvaneh, Farahanka Brothers, Maria
Chdjari
This is a 27" x 40" US one-sheet poster for the 1995 Jafar Panahi
film The White Balloon original Persian title بادکنک سفید Badkonake
sefid written by Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi and starring
Aida Mohammadkhani as the little girl Razieh, from whose point of view
the entire story is told. Plot summary: The Iranian New Year has
arrived and according to cultural ritural, everyone must have a
goldfish. Razieh can get a free one from her family's courtyard pond,
but she thinks those are too skinny. She wants a fat one costing 100
tomans she has seen in a store's display window. Her family thinks
this is too much money to spend on a goldfish, but after a lot of
pleading she persuades her mother to give it to her. She almost loses
it twice, then drops it into a cellar through an open sidewalk grate;
the money is now visible but inaccessible.
The film has won many
prizes including the Golden Camera Award at the 1995 Cannes Film
Festival; it was rated by The Guardian as one of the 50 best
family films of all time. Jafar Panahi, the film's director, was
arrested in 2010 and sentenced to six years in prison (later reduced
to one year) for crimes against Iran's national security and for
making propaganda against the government in his work as a filmmaker in
response to the 2009 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad as Iran's
president. He was also subjected to a 20-year ban on working as a
filmmaker. For more
see Wikipedia's article on Panahi.
Cast and crew: Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, Parviz Shahbazi, Aida Mohammadkhani, Mohsen Kalifi, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaly, Anna Bourkowska, Mohammad Shahani, Mohammed Bakhtiar, Aliasghar Barzegar, Hasan Neamatolahi, Bosali Bahary, Mohammadreza Baryar, Shaker Hayely, Homayoon Rokani, Mohammad Farakani
I just posted the last of a new group of about 80 Iranian posters.
That was a change of pace for me because most of my posts have been
about Egyptian posters. The Iranians and the Egyptians tend not to be
interested in each other at any level, but they are both interesting
to me. In a Skype conversation a few days ago I offered to show some
Iranian posters to an Egyptian poster collecting friend, and he flatly
refused to look at any of them. He likes American, Italian and
Egyptian posters, but forget those Iranian ones! He doesn't know any
Persian, so in a way I can see why. Here are a few thoughts I've had
recently going back and forth between Egyptian and Iranian films:
Iranians don't have real glamor queens like Egypt's Hind Rostom or
Samia Gamal, even though they have a lot of very beautiful women in
their films. There is also less religion in Iranian films generally,
despite efforts by the current Iranian government to change that.
Egypt has a much larger film industry, also older and far more
diverse. Egyptian films are usually bigger productions with larger
budgets, casts and crews. Egyptian films are seen by much larger
audiences because they are distributed throughout the Arab world. If
someone wants to study one of the Arabic dialects for use in
day-to-day conversation, the Egyptian dialect would be the first choice
since every Arab has grown up with Egyptian movies and is very
familiar with Egyptian idioms. There are a lot more Egyptian remakes
of foreign films such as An Affair to Remember and Irma La
Douce. The Egyptian filmmaker has always had his eye on the rest
of the world's film community, and he plays to it. The Iranians have
done less of this, although that is changing.
Iranian films seem to be more introspective, exploring indigenous
ideas and domestic ethnicity. The Iranians haven't had successful
political filmmakers like Egypt's late socialist director Salah
Abouseif who spent his entire career using Egyptian film as a vehicle
for exploring international ideological themes. The Iranians also
lack multicultural internationlists like Egypt's late Youssef Chahine,
who was constantly contrasting Egypt's ethnic character and history
with competing and usually invasive foreign values. Because of his
high international stature, Chahine's films sometimes had a
distracting self-conscious, bombastic quality that one rarely sees in
the films of the great Iranian directors. To me the Iranian film
industry is much more genuine overall, probably because it is not as
heavily industrialized.
Egypt's most brilliant and original director for my taste is the late Mohamed
Khan, [1942-2016] who was of Pakistani extraction even though he lived in Egypt
all his life. His Iranian counterpart is the late Abbas Kiarostami [1940-2016]. Both
directors have made insightful minimalist films with improvised
stories told on real-life sets, often with characters played by people
who were not professional actors. Their movies sometimes look like
documentary fiction and they were mostlly low-budget.
Certified Copy (Juliette Binoche) - (2010) Italian one-sheet
Certified Copy (2010) Juliette Binoche, William Shimell (directed by Abbas Kiarostami) Beautiful film, the first I've seen by Kiarostami that wasn't in Persian. I can't wait to see his latest, Like Someone in Love.
