Up
in the mountains, teachers with blackboards strapped to their
backs search for anybody who will agree to be taught by them.
But the blackboards aren't just for teaching; they serve as
shields, as shelter, and some people even use them to barter
for brides. Kids smuggling contraband crawl towards the border,
past armed guards, hidden in the middle of a vast flock of sheep.
Old men wander disconsolately across the mountains, hoping somehow
to reach their homeland.
These
are some of the images in Samira Makhmalbaf's second feature,
Takhté Siah, or Blackboards,
a film about the desperate plight of the Kurds.
"It's
an epic and a sentimental film at the same time," says producer
Marco Müller. "It's not only a love story but a way for
Samira to say what she wants about women's conditions in that
part of the world. It's very personal and incredibly ambitious."
Makhmalbaf's
debut feature, The Apple (1998), made when she
was only 18, was an intimately focused, often claustrophobic
chamber piece about two kids whose father locks them away from
the outside world. Its successor is on an altogether grander
scale. There are more than 200 speaking parts.
The
film was shot on location in a remote part of Kurdistan. Conditions
were incredibly gruelling technicians had to carry
equipment across rocky, treacherous ground, Samira hadn't
secured permission from the authorities to shoot so close
to the Iran/Iraq border, and
there was always a danger that the production would be closed
down. Anyone
interested in the background to the film should seek out the
'making of' documentary. "It was one of the craziest shootings
in that part of the world," claims Müller, who wasn't
present on set himself. "You don't see a single soul. You
have to get there by helicopter. Can you imagine Europeans
or Westerners there? You don't board a helicopter in Iran
without everybody knowing it."
In
preparation for the film, Samira travelled widely across Iran
with her director father Mohsen Makhmalbaf in tow. They discussed
many potential stories. "The idea which eventually became Blackboards
pleased me more than the others," she says. For
Samira, it was a formidable challenge to work with a cast consisting
almost entirely of non-professionals, whose first language was
Kurdish. She recruited most of the actors on location, which
had advantages and disadvantages. In some ways, she says, it
was "easy, because the village people are simple, modest and
unpretentious. And difficult, because they knew nothing about
film-making and the camera."
Blackboards
may well have been co-produced, edited and co-written by Samira's
father, but there was never any question of the 20-year-old
director
deferring to paternal influence.
"She
is a strong-willed young woman she knows exactly what
she wants and she knows how to get it," says Müller (who
first encountered her almost a decade ago at the Locarno Festival).
"We had to trust that her relationship with her father was
not just a father-daughter relationship and that she could
impose her own ideas at the script level... Mohsen was elegant
enough not to be present on set." Blackboards
is one of a four-film series by young first- and second-time
directors that is being supported by Fabrica Cinema. This
Benetton-backed production company was set up in 1998 with
a brief to support films "that no other producer in the West
would want to touch."
Oliveiro
Toscani, the flamboyant photographer and advertising guru behind
the Treviso-based Fabrica Workshop (which also includes writing,
design, photography, music and video departments) gave the series
his blessing on one condition. "Toscani was very enthusiastic
about the political agenda of Fabrica Cinema," recalls Müller.
"He challenged me to do something that would correspond 100
per cent with the rules and regulations of Fabrica that
is, that the film-makers would be under 25 years of age."
Blackboards
was edited in Iran, behind the government's back. "We worked
together with Mohsen but also with our own editor," says Müller.
"We had to finish in Iran before we could take it out.
"Iran
is a country where, if you want to, you can still find space
to do something unorthodox. An in-between space between
officialdom and illegality does exist." Müller
and Fabrica Cinema took responsibility for smuggling the film
out of Iran. It was not submitted to the censors. "The point
was to be able to have the final cut," says Müller. "I
think eventually, in one or two years, the film will be shown
in Iran."
Geoffrey
Macnab
