Offscreen. Vol 10, Issue 7.

"In recent years, Iranian cinema has become the yardstick of cultural, social and political progress in Iran," writes Najmeh Khalili Mahani in the first of two pieces in the new issue of Offscreen, which focuses to a great extent on films distributed by Women Make Movies.

The world knows Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi, and that's all well and good, but, as noted a few days ago, Iranians, like moviegoers the world over, are making lighter fare much more popular. Mahani sets out "less to debate the artistic or cinematic merits of this type of Iranian cinema, than to examine the efficacy of its particular mode of narrative in bringing about social reforms," and particularly for women. Also: "Although different in style and in form, Iranian Journey and The Ladies Room overlap in one message: that the Iranian women seek the sources of their strength from within."

Donato Totaro: "In Sentenced to Marriage and Highway Courtesans women of vastly different social, cultural, racial and economic background similarily suffer hardship under unjust and archaic patriarchal social custom and law."

For Gilda Boffa, Time of Love "is very important in understanding the shift that [Mohsen] Makhmalbaf made artistically and ideologically" as he shifted into his "third phase" in the early 90s.

David Durnell on Anatomy of Hell: "[Catherine] Breillat's feminist salvation is to make what is deemed impure beautiful, and to make what is sin - what is filth - a work of art, of righteousness, a Nietzscheian transvaluation."

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2006 1:23 AM