BAMPFA
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
By : Jason Sanders
In the late 1990s, at the height of his international popularity for films like A Moment of Innocenceand Gabbeh, the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf announced that he would cut back on creating films, and instead help create filmmakers. Thus the Makhmalbaf Film House was formed, with Mohsen’s wife, Marziyeh Meshkini, and young daughters Samira and Hana as its first auteurs in the making. The films that followed applied the docu-fiction hybrid aesthetic of Mohsen’s earlier work—employing nonprofessional actors and a street-level realism combined with moments of the surreal—to a pointedly political real-world purpose, one fully committed to exposing issues of poverty, exploitation, and abuse and supporting the struggle for female empowerment.In Samira’s words, “We are what we think. Cinema can change thoughts.” To that end, despite condemnation from authorities and extremists (Mohsen has lived in exile for years, while the filming of Samira’s Two-Legged Horse in Afghanistan was disrupted by a bomb attack), the Film House has produced nuanced and thoughtful portraits of life on the margins, whether in Tehran, Tajikistan, Kurdistan, or post-Taliban Afghanistan.
“Our filmmaking is somewhere between documentary and narrative fiction, between truth and opinion, between politics and poetry,” Mohsen wrote. Urgent dispatches from a region that is still little understood in the West, refusing to turn a blind eye to the cruelty of the powerful, these poems of dust and dreams are even more essential than ever.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is showcasing some the greatest hits from Iran's finest Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose filmmaking family has been churning out masterpieces for decades, between September 1– October 20, 2018.
