Children of Heaven (1997)

One of the most successful Ira­nian films in the West, Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. It opens with eight-year-old Ali losing his younger sister Zahra’s newly repaired shoes. To avoid admitting this loss to his father, Ali and Zahra share a pair of sneakers, and much of the film revolves around their at­tempts to manage their exchange without being late for school.

The importance of shoes is emphasized when hundreds are depicted lined up outside a mosque, where the children’s father works serving tea, while their owners pray inside. Scenes in which the camera often focuses on the feet of the children running through the often cramped streets of poor, southern Tehran strikingly contrast a sequence set in the upscale, northern part of the city, where Ali proves much more capable than his father of communicating with the wealthy, coming to entertain a privileged boy while his father sprays trees in a spa­cious garden.

Finally, Ali enters a race in which third prize is a pair of shoes, but ends up disappointed when he comes in first. Children of Heaven is a melodrama, and Majidi uses slow-motion and emotive music, among other devices, to ensure audience empathy with his young characters. The film’s English title substitutes “Heaven” for “Sky,” a more literal translation from the Persian.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1997, Genre – Drama, Country – Iran, Language – Persian, Producer – Amir Esfandiari, Director – Majid Majidi, Music Director – Keivan Jahanshahi, Cast - Mohammad Amir Naji ,Mir Farrokh Hashemian, Bahareh Sedighi, Nafiseh Jafar Mohammadi ,Fereshteh Sarabandi ,Kamal Mirkarimi, Behzad Rafi ,Dariush Mokhtari ,Mohammad Hassan Hosseinian ,Masumeh Dalir, Zahra Mezani ,Kazem Asgharpour ,Mohammad Hossein Shahedi, Seyyed Ali Hosseini

Sara (1993)

Inspired by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and adapted to Iranian realities, Sara presents a positive protagonist, who is effectively involved in the welfare of her family. She saves her husband’s life by borrowing the money for his operation with­out his knowledge and embroiders wedding gowns secretly in the house for four years to pay back the loan. When the husband, who is shown as a self-centered character with tunnel vision, finally finds out, instead of thanking her, he gets upset because now they are indebted to his corrupt clerk. He calls her ‘a brainless woman’. In an emotionally charged scene, he stands on top of the stairs and yells at Sara’s tiny figure down below that he will not let her bring up his child. By the time conflict reaches a resolution, Sara has gained a new outlook on life, which makes it impossible for things to remain the same. Her final look from the rear window of the taxi as she leaves her husband is full of fear and apprehension. The film is open-ended, but there is every indication that her revolt is far from over. Now that she has gained self-respect and confidence, she can have a new start, with or without her husband.

The last duologue between the couple is significant. Unlike the routine conversations about mundane daily matters that we had heard before as the couple sat to eat while watching television, this is the first time they really talk to each other:

Sara: I have been victimized, first by my father, then by you. Neither of you treated me like a human being. When I was at my father’s home, I had to think like him. If I had an idea of my own, I had to shut up because he did not like being contradicted. When I began to see things, I fell into your house. Here I was the mute little darling who had to do what she was told to do and keep quiet.

Husband: No man would sacrifice his honor for the sake of love.

Sara: And yet women do it all the time.

Apart from Sara, there are two other women in the film: the old aunt, who is the epitome of a woman seen and not heard, and Sara’s friend and confidante, Sima, an independ­ent, self-supporting widow. Unlike Sara, Sima is not afraid of men. She knows their weak points and she knows how to deal with them, which is unusual for women who are brought up in traditional Muslim households, where mothers install the fear of masculine superiority in their daughters at an earlier age.

Sara’s revolt brings about a revelation; faced with a determined woman, men are as helpless as a child. The roles can easily be reversed. The circular camera shots of the last sequences show the confused state of the husband running around his wife, who is calm and composed as she prepares her luggage. As the taxi pulls away, he stands at the door helpless like a child who has lost his toy. With only a bedsheet covering his lower parts, he also looks rather ridiculous.

Among the ‘women’ cycle of Mehrjui’s work, Sara is perhaps the most outstanding. The film enjoyed wide popularity in Iran, especially among women who found the story of a woman’s sacrifices for her husband and the selfishness of Muslim men who put disgrace to their honor before everything else very familiar – Gönül Dönmez-Colin

Cast and Production Credits

Year - 1993, Genre – Drama, Country -Iran, Language – Persian, Director – Dariush Mehrjui, Cast – Niki Karimi, Amin Tarokh, Khosro Shakibai, Yasman Malek-Nasr

Two Women (1998)

Two Women tells the story of two school friends, intelli­gent and beautiful Fereshteh from a modest background and the more privileged Roya. (Their names, respectively, mean ‘angel’ and ‘dream’ in Farsi.) Fereshteh’s student life in Tehran becomes a nightmare when a demented stalker carry­ing a knife and a vial of acid begins to harass her. Following the Islamist Revolution, when universities are closed for three years, Roya marries a man of her choice and becomes a successful career woman. Fereshteh returns to her small town and marries an older man of means chosen for her by her family After the marriage, Fereshteh’s husband does not keep his promise to allow her to continue her studies, forbids her to read books, locks the telephone and accuses her of lacking maternal instincts. As her intellectual inferior, he mocks her intelligence and dismisses her desire to study and work outside the home as mere cravings for returning to her ‘questionable’ living in the big city. When Fereshteh seeks a divorce, the judge asks whether her husband beats her or neglects his duties. The fact that he ‘humiliates’ her is not a good reason. Women’s right to divorce was restored in late 1983, but mental cruelty does not count as a reason for divorce.

The film’s symmetrical structure works on opposi­tional binarist constructions such as a happily married career woman of average talents versus a socio—economically victim­ized pretty and intelligent woman emancipation versus tradition; victim versus perpetrator and female innocence versus male violence. ‘Fereshteh and Roya are the same woman,’ Milani (filmmaker) explained. ‘I wanted to show a woman’s potential and her reality.’ The systematic disintegration of a woman with enormous potential by established conventional threes is very significant. When Fereshteh is finally free of her chains, she cries: I feel like a free bird without any wings.’

Fereshteh’s ferocious polemics with her father, with the judge at the family court and with her tyrannical husband certainly heighten the dramatic structure and serve as a vehicle for delivering Milani’s message. However, the proba­bility of such confrontations is somewhat doubtful. In most patriarchal societies, women are not even allowed to speak in the presence of male authority. Milani defends her position, claiming that Fereshteh is a rebellious character even within her restricted environment. She does not win but she still carries the fight. Iranian women are strong according to Milani. The results of the University entrance examinations are the proof. Fifty—two percent of those who pass are women. The sad reality is that, after graduation, the husband says, ‘I don’t need your money’, and that is it.

All characters in the film are typical characters, Milani asserts. They represent the present atmosphere in her coun­try, but the stalker, specifically, represents bad education. His actions stand as a symbol for living in an atmosphere that trains him to behave in that manner. The violator is also the victim. More than sexual repression, which exists in Iranian society, she explains, his is a problem of identity in a society that does not respect individual identity.

The clear message of the film is that traditional values concerning what makes an ideal woman obstruct the develop­ment of a woman’s potential abilities, while modern ways of living, such as receiving education and working as a profes­sional, aid her material and spiritual growth. This is perhaps the first time that the oppression of women by men in authority — husbands, fathers or judges — has been so starkly revealed in Iranian cinema. While Milani gained a large number of enemies of the opposite sex, the impact of the film was so strong as to radicalize even ‘docile women’, as she told me.

Milane had to wait eight years before the script for Two Women could be approved. Produced during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, it drew over three million viewers in Iran despite the fact that any advertisement of the film on television was banned.

Production Credits

Year - 1998, Genre – Drama, Country - Iran, Language – Persian, Producer(s) – N/A, Director - Tahmineh Milani