Saving faith The Twelfth Annual Boston Festival of Films from Iran BY PETER KEOUGH
	"The Twelfth Annual Boston Festival of Films From Iran" Museum of Fine Arts | November 11–December 4

Why does the world’s most notorious "faith-based" nation produce some of the world’s best movies? Every Iranian film opens with the invocation "In the name of God" — which could warn of false piety but in most cases implies that the filmmakers take their work seriously and believe it might partake of spiritual substance. These films dramatize a world in which actions have consequences, details have meaning, and immanent revelation shimmers beneath the surface of things. And not to make a case for censorship, but the limits on expression imposed by a theocracy can compel the artist to become craftier in encoding a message and quicker in discerning deception and hypocrisy in others, especially the powers that be. At its best, Iranian cinema seeks out the profound through poetry.

Of course, such a cinema survives at the whim of the ignorant, the intolerant, and the fanatical. Given the retrenchment of hardliners in Iran, its marginalization by the West, and the threat of nuclear weapons, who knows how long that country will keep faith with one of its most precious resources?

In the meantime, the Twelfth Annual Boston Festival of Films from Iran represents one of the best selections yet, perhaps because it reflects an anxiety about the future. "All men are unfaithful," a long-suffering wife in Bahram Beyzaie’s KILLING RABID DOGS (2001; November 19 @ 3:15 pm) laments. The heroine, Golrokh, believes her husband is an exception. He’s in jail for fraud, the millions he’s taken from bilked investors unaccounted for. Insisting that his partner absconded with the dough, he persuades his estranged wife to buy back the bad checks from his debtors and get him released.

She starts out naive but gets savvy fast, facing down and outwitting lecherous pigs and brutal mobsters, taking a beating but never giving up. And Mozhdeh Shamsai’s vibrant performance anchors her husband Beyzaie’s flamboyant narrative. Forget the meditative pace you expect of Iranian films: Killing Rabid Dogs careers like a Hong Kong action picture. Set in the oppressive post-revolutionary era of the ’80s, it’s punctuated by expressionist details of that era — armed soldiers, tyrannical political graffiti, sandbags — presaging perhaps more bad days to come.

A sense of déjà vu also haunts Rakhshan Bani-Etemad & Mohsen Abdolvahab’s GILANEH (2005; November 12 @ 5 pm), which begins on New Year’s Eve in 1988 as Iraqi missiles rain down on Tehran and ends 15 years later as US forces move against Saddam in 2003. The heroine of the title is a resourceful widow whose son-in-law has deserted from the army and is hiding out in the city and whose beloved son has just been drafted and is on his way to the front. Her pregnant daughter wants to track down her husband, and the bulk of the film is taken up with their pilgrimage from the country to the bombed-out city through a landscape filled with those fleeing war’s disaster. It’s a mutely eloquent anti-war statement, far braver than any equivalent Hollywood movie, and coming from a country supposedly more restrictive of freedom of expression.

Well, let’s not get carried away. In 2001, Tahmineh Milani was arrested by an Islamic Revolutionary Court for her film The Hidden Half, and only an international outcry spared her from a possible death sentence. She’s as tough as any of the women in her politically brave and entertaining features. In THE UNWANTED WOMAN (2005; December 4 @ 3 pm), a well-educated schoolteacher puts up with her sleazy husband’s philandering until he flaunts his latest mistress. When he goes on a road trip with the woman, the wife insists on going along, bringing their child in tow. What starts out almost as a black comedy veers into a preachy melodrama when a fugitive wife killer joins the mix. Not one of Milani’s best, but she deserves the ILEX Award for Excellence in Iranian Cinema she’ll receive at the screening.

It’s disquieting to hear (or read in subtitles) dialogue in an Iranian film that’s as obscene and inventive as David Mamet’s. Certainly the censors thought so: Mani Haghighi’s ABADAN (2003; November 18 at 8 pm + November 26 at 2 pm) has been banned in its native land. Perhaps they found not just the language objectionable but also the rollicking, contrapuntal story, which lampoons touchy subjects ranging from marital fidelity to martyrdom in the Iran/Iraq War. An estranged wife persuades her husband to find her wayward, dotty father. While he hunts for the old man with his raffish best friend, the wife makes pals with her hubby’s young mistress. Meanwhile, the old man gleefully searches for a dead companion while dreaming of running off to the Shangri-la of the title — in fact, a city destroyed in the Iran/Iraq War.

A less light-hearted tale of a promised land is Abdolrasoul Golbon’s debut, PARADISE IS SOMEWHERE ELSE (2003; November 20 @ 1:30 pm). A 17-year-old shepherd in a primitive border region saves his money so he can seek his fortune in the Emirates. On the eve of his departure, his father dies in an accident at the construction site where he works. The tribal code calls for vengeance against the corrupt manager responsible, and before he’s done the youth has compromised not only himself but a refugee Afghan boy he’s befriended. Deceptively simple and with a John Ford–like sense of landscape, Paradise hints at deep discontents and frustrated longings.

These sentiments seem to have spurred a mystical bent in recent Iranian cinema, a dreamlike trend reminiscent of Turkish films. Kamal Tabrizi’s A PIECE OF BREAD (2005; November 18 @ 6 pm) also takes place on the troubled frontier. An illiterate widow suddenly becomes able to read the Koran, and pilgrims flock to her for miracle cures. The central government fears trouble, so it sends an officer accompanied by a crusty mullah and a simple-minded soldier to debunk the claim. The last of this unlikely trio seems the only one in tune with what’s genuine and holy, a sensibility that Tabrizi conveys with wry and numinous details and a dénouement that will leave the mullah and probably the audience scratching their heads.

Less orthodox in its mysticism is Ali Mosaffa’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY FAR AWAY (2005; December 3 @ 3:45 pm), which begins and ends with a Borgesian dream. In between, a disillusioned engineer who’s estranged from his family ventures into the night to rescue a young woman who called his number at random to say she was planning to commit suicide. The woman is an aspiring actress whose flirtation with death seems just another role. She proves a nocturnal guide through a city full of eerie portents of the engineer’s past, premonitions of his future, and the suggestion that his present state is even more spurious than he suspects.

This veiled critique of scientific rationalism, skepticism, and materialism gets a more overt and moving treatment in Reza Mirkarimi’s SO FAR, SO CLOSE (2005; November 20 @ 3:15 pm). This time it’s a doctor rather than an engineer whose over-reliance on human rationality and scientific progress has left him in a spiritual void. As usual, he misses his teenage son’s birthday, but this time he learns that the boy has developed inoperable brain cancer. In desperation, he drives to the desert where his son is on an astronomical field trip, yet another journey in which encounters have mystical import. Far from being a pat parable about the conflict between faith and reason, Mirkarimi’s film avoids sentiment and platitudes and instead relies on real characters and luminous imagery. The last sequence will stir the faith of the most cynical — if not faith in God, then faith in cinema.