'Cinema is a conversation'

Meenakshi Shedde / TNN / Aug 8, 2004, 00:00 IST

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Talented filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf talks about her vast body of work and the power of film.

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">"I''m afraid of people who think they''ve found all the facts. I start a film only with an idea and I ask questions through cinema. Even at the end, I don''t know if I have all the answers," admits Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, commenting on Michael Moore''s Fahrenheit 9/11. A director of repute, she is lively, and her hands are as articulate as her thoughts. Barely 24, she is stunning with her large, mascara''d eyes, and a faintly brown, adventurous twirl of hair escapes from under the black veil covering her head. Samira has a stunning body of work. At 18, her debut film, The Apple, was in official selection at the Cannes film festival; her two subsequent films, The Blackboard and At Five in the Afternoon, were nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes, but won the Jury Prize. The last also won the Golden Peacock at the International Film Festival of India last year. The Blackboard, shown at the Osian-Cinefan Festival of Asian Cinema in New Delhi in July 2004, was part of a package that honoured the astonishingly talented Makhmalbaf family. Dad Mohsen Makhmalbaf, wife Marziyeh (formerly Marziyeh Meshkini), daughters Samira and Hana and son Maysam are all film directors. Does she feel a burden of expectation, being an Iranian Muslim woman and a talented young director, who''s an ambassador of sorts? "It is not a burden, but there is a certain sense of responsibility. When I sleep at night," she explains, pillowing her head with her hands, "I remember I have so many things to do. But cinema is a time for forgetting. When I make a film, I forget everything else â€“ that I''m a feminist or a Muslim or a woman â€“ and just concentrate on the moment." Her Blackboard, which chronicles the lives of teachers who wander around the bleak Kurdish landscapes of Iran with blackboards on their backs, looking for students, explores the value of knowledge and language in our times. Her Apple is an exquisite jewel, mixing documentary and fiction like milk and water. An aged man with a blind wife locks up his two daughters at home as he goes out to eke a living: the girls are retarded, having never left home till they are rescued by a social worker when they are 13. Samira didn''t merely use non-professional actors for the film: she used the real life protagonists to live/act out their lives. Days after reading a report about them, Samira shot the film in 11 days. "It was hardest to earn the old man''s trust," she admits. "I had to love that man to listen to him, after all he loved his children. You know, even a cat will come to you when it knows you love it." The film was a revelation for Samira herself. "How the two girls changed in just 11 days! It made me realise the power of communication. Women have fewer opportunities for communication. And it is communication that makes a human being more complete," she explains. Samira seems a firm believer in the power of communication and cinema to accelerate change. "I let the girls'' reality and imagination come into my film. Cinema is a conversation. My characters changed a bit, but then I changed too," she reasons. Her last film, At Five in the Afternoon, is about a girl in post-Taliban Afghanistan, who dreams of becoming the president one day. The film was banned for a while in Iran. "The ban was for several reasons, but also partly because my hair was visible." Despite the veil? "Ah, but they said it was drawn back a bit much," she answers. That gorgeous curl â€“ we would have been surprised if it didn''t get her into trouble someday.</div> </div>

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