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Mohsen Makhmalbaf: Patriarch of Iranian cinema
Mohsen Makhmalbaf's, the patriarch of Iranian cinema, career has undergone many radical changes in a relatively short time.
Makhmalbaf, a school-drop-out, was born in a poor neighborhood in southern Tehran in 1957. After leaving school he formed an Islamic militant group and joined the clandestine fight against the Shah's regime. He was arrested when he was only 17, and served a five-year sentence. When the 1979 Revolution brought an Islamic regime to power Makhmalbaf was freed. The revolution that freed him from prison also unleashed his creative energies. He switched over to writing novels and stage plays. In 1982 he made his first film Nasouh Repentance about a bank clerk who seeks true repentance while facing death. This was the first in a trilogy of highly didactic films with strong religious themes and poor cinematic quality. In fact, making the trilogy also provided Makhmalbaf with his basic film training. His fourth film Boycott (1985) set in a prison for political activists of different convictions continued to glorify Islamic values. The Peddler (1987) marked a turning point in Makhmalbaf's career. It brought him international recognition. The film was about a society caught in a web of moral and social decline. The Cyclist (1989) traces the plight of a poor Afghan man forced to ride his bicycle continuously for a week to raise money for his ailing wife's treatment. Marriage of the Blessed (1990) is about a bitterly disillusioned war veteran on the verge of mental breakdown. Makhmalbaf became a controversial figure when the two films he made in 1991, A Time of Love and The Nights of the Zayandeh-Rude, were banned for dealing with physical love and raising doubts about the revolution. Nasseredin Shah, the Movie Actor (a.k.a. Once upon a Time, the Cinema -1992), an affectionate look at the history of Iranian cinema, and The Actor (1993), an uneven comedy about a childless couple, revealed the lighter side of Makhmalbaf's creativity. But it didn't take him long to go back to his penetrating explorations of social realities in the disturbingly self-reflexive Salam Cinema (1994). Two of his recent films, A Moment of Innocence (a.k.a. Bread and the Vase) and Gabbeh, also were kept from distribution in Iran after their initial screenings in the 1996 Fajr Film Festival, an annual showcase for domestic films. Gabbeh, a captivatingly lyrical saga of a woman and her romantic longing in a nomadic setting, was released domestically only after its successful festival run and a string of European openings. A Moment of Innocence is a thought-provoking story about the nature of truth, remained shelved for two additional years. The film recalls a traumatic chapter in Makhmalbaf's youth that led to his imprisonment for stabbing a policeman. When his films were banned in Iran he decided to move out of the country. In 1998, he went to Tajikistan to make The Silence, about a 10-year-old blind boy supporting himself and his mother by tuning stringed instruments. He also helped his 18-year-old daughter, Samira, make her film debut The Apple, a documentary-style fact-based tale about two teenage sisters confined in their house by their blind mother and destitute father. Though barely forty, Makhmalbaf has already created an impressive literary and cinematic collection of 16 feature films, 2 short films, 30 screenplays, 10 plays, 2 essay collections, and 28 short stories.
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