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Tehran Taboo (2017)
Tehran Taboo (2017) is an animated film on the lives of three women living in Tehran. Initially, I thought the film will be about the underbelly of Tehran, but it talks about the miseries and compromises that the less privileged go through in any of the large cities in the world. The film is available on Kanopy. The film by Ali Soozandeh – who is settled in Germany since 1995 – is intense and the storytelling is so detailed that we are quickly drawn into the lives of the main characters. The first one is a mother who raises her young son alone as her drug addict husband is behind…
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Today (2014)
When we think of Iran, films are not the first things that come to our mind. In recent times the few Iranian movies that I saw like Taxi (2015)and Night Shift (2015), though made with limited budgets, they were impressive and made me realise what I was missing. The film-makers there, are producing excellent films that showcase the socio-economic conditions in Iran very well. Today (2014) is one such film, that was exhibited as part of the ongoing Iranian Film Festival organised by Chennai’s ICAF society. The film is about an old Taxi driver, and the unconditional kindness he shows towards a complete stranger, a pregnant lady who gets into…
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Night Shift (2015)
I saw this film onboard the Qatar Airways flight to USA. Night Shift (Shift-e Shab) is an Iranian film directed by a famous Iranian actress Niki Karimi. The story happens in Tehran, a city I had seen earlier in another Iranian film Taxi (2015) where Director Jafar Panahi had captured a city and its soul from the insides of a Taxi. In Night Shift we see the struggles of a wife living in a conservative society trying hard to understand why is her husband missing and then saving him. Farzad (played by Mohammad Reza Foroutan) an accounts officer in a respectable firm in Tehran is living in an upscale apartment with his wife…
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Taxi (2015)
Today in the on going Chennai International Film Festival I saw Taxi (2015). What powerful and bold story telling!. A must watch for anyone who likes good movies and cares about the society we live in. Taxi (2015) runs for 80 minutes, filmed entirely from cameras placed inside a running car (Taxi) in Tehran, Iran. Directed by Jafar Panahi, who is banned from 2010 to make films has used this technique to circumvent the ban. The story happens over half-a-day in the life of a taxi driver in Tehran, the taxi driver being Jafar Panahi as himself. We see people from different walks of life in the city get in and get out of his…
