Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Casting back through my archives: I covered a lot of Iranian films over the years, and am thinking about this rich and rewarding world cinema right now. Here are some vintage reviews of movies from vital filmmakers: Jafar Panahi, Majid Majidi, and Samira Makhmalbaf. All originally ran in The Herald, and all are available for rent at Scarecrow Video.
Crimson Gold (2003)
Despite the repressive political climate, filmmakers in Iran continue to push and prod at the limits of what can be shown on movie screens. The last time director Jafar Panahi made a film, 2000's The Circle, he produced a blistering look at the place of women as second-class citizens.
Panahi's new film shows elements of day-to-day reality in Iran that will make it difficult to screen there. It is written by the dean of Iranian filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami.
Like many of Kiarostami's pictures, Crimson Gold has a bold, unusual structure. It is arranged around large chunks of story. We fill in the rest. The opening sequence, played out in a single harrowing camera take, depicts a jewelry store robbery gone bad. The owner is shot and the robber commits suicide.
With the next sequence, we flash back to figure out how we got there. Two friends, Hussein and Ali, sit around contemplating the criminal life. We recognize them as the robbers from the store, but here they are just a couple of poor slobs without much money or hope.
Hussein (played by Hussein Emadeddin), a huge man with a slow mind, tools around Tehran on his Vespa, delivering pizzas. He's a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, planning to marry his friend's sister.
Part of the plot revolves around Hussein's bitter humiliation at trying to buy jewelry for the fiancee. The jeweler makes it courteously but firmly clear that Hussein and his friends are out of their league in his shop.
There is a fascinating scene of Hussein trying to deliver pizza to a building where a house party is taking place. He can't go inside, because the police are staking it out, ready to arrest the young men and women as they leave (the people at the party are not married, and thus committing a crime against the religious state).
Hussein hangs around, talking to the people outside, giving away pizza, and watching the arrests. We feel we are seeing a slab of life, unfiltered and almost undramatized. (But not without humor. When an arrested partygoer protests, "But we're married!", the policeman drawls, "Right—who goes out with their wives?")
Another long sequence has Hussein invited into the plush apartment of a wealthy young man. Like an interlude from a Fellini movie, this scene gives a dislocating contrast to the hero's mundane life.
It doesn't have the power of The Circle, but Crimson Gold is a challenging film. Its political backdrop is specific to Iran, but its human element is universal.
The Color of Paradise (1999)
A couple of weeks ago, an excellent Iranian film about the inner life of a blind boy, The Silence, had a brief run in the area. Now comes another Iranian film about a blind boy. This strange coincidence doesn’t seem redundant, because both films are quite good.
The Color of Paradise is the touching saga of a blind 8-year-old named Mohammad, played by Mohsen Ramezani. He is a student at an institute for the blind, in Tehran.
But his family lives in the countryside, and his father begs the school to take the boy permanently. They refuse, and father journeys back home with Mohammad in tow for the summer.
Most of the story follows the father’s attempts to unload Mohammad onto other people. The backdrop is the rural land of northern Iran, which is in full bloom. Mohammad’s sisters, and his fiercely protective grandmother, try to shelter the boy. But the father has a notion to send him away as an apprentice to a carpenter.
Really, the plot turns in Color of Paradise are straight out of Victorian melodrama. D.W. Griffith might have directed a similar story during the days of silent cinema.
But director Majid Majidi achieves a simple beauty, and he builds the tempo and suspense when the film approaches its climax. Nature becomes a major character, with a central irony at work: we appreciate the rolling hills and the vivid wildflowers, but Mohammad does not.
Majidi’s previous film was the charming Children of Heaven, which had success on the American arthouse circuit. If his movies seem less adventurous than those of other Iranian directors (notably Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who made The Silence), they are still very accomplished.
Iranian directors often make films about children, in part because the chances of running afoul of government censorship are lessened with youth-oriented tales. Whatever the reason, the focus on children has led to a series of strongly emotional films. The Color of Paradise is not the most complex of these pictures, but its unadorned, straightforward style is heart-wrenching.
Blackboards (2000)
The great director Mohsen Makhmalbaf continues his own quiet revolution in Iran. Along with directing his own films, he has set up a Film House to educate other would-be moviemakers.
This includes women—a radical step right there—and his own family. Makhmalbaf's wife, Marzieh Meshkini, directed the exceptional The Day I Became a Woman. His daughter Samira, who is only now 21 years old, has already directed two features, and had them both screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
Samira's second film, Blackboards, arrives this week, with a storyline penned by her father. It is a very slim outline, made in a bleak setting, yet it contains very touching moments.
The characters are Kurds, wandering through Iran (or Iranian Kurdistan, if that's the better way to phrase it). We first meet a group of men trekking through the mountains with blackboards strapped to their backs. This absurd sight, which could come from Samuel Beckett play, is explained. These men are teachers, but they must travel in search of students. They separate, and we follow two of the teachers on their diverging paths.
One man (Bahman Ghobadi) discovers a procession of young boys marching through the hills. They are carrying packages on their backs—contraband, apparently—and have no time for his offers of education. One boy is curious about learning the alphabet, so the teacher tags along as they keep moving. Only later will he learn about the risks of smuggling.
The other teacher (Said Mohamadi) joins another group of nomads. These Kurdish men, evidently refugees from Iraq, are trying to find the border with Iraq.
Once again the teacher can't interest anyone in lessons, but he does agree to take these elders to the border, in exchange for a handful of walnuts. Then he notices the lone woman among them. After a few moments, he proposes marriage to her aged father, and the old man agrees. In an impromptu marriage (the teacher and bride-to-be are not allowed to look at each other, so they keep the blackboard between them), the two are wed. He keeps trying to teach her the spelling of the phrase "I love you," but the bride is only vaguely interested.
Blackboards has a number of scenes that are both touching and (despite the harsh circumstances) funny, like that marriage. There's a wonderful early scene of a teacher trying to read a letter whose language he can't recognize to an illiterate shepherd.
Things turn harrowing when the travelers are fired upon. They fear chemical weapons, which they have first-hand knowledge about. Here the movie alludes to Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish people in Iraq.
Fascinating movie. It feels like a fable at times, but then we're reminded of geopolitical realities. Blackboards is a small picture in many ways, but it offers up some all too human truths.
April 10, 2026
