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| Children of Heaven
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Brand: Disney
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Triumphant prizewinner at many prestigious film festivals, this uplifting, crowd-pleasing story of family and love was also nominated for an Academy Award(R) as Best Foreign Language Film. When Ali loses his sister Zahra's school shoes, this young pair dream up a plan to stay out of trouble: they'll share his shoes and keep it a secret from their parents! But if they're going to sucessfully cover their tracks, Ali and Zahra must carefully watch their step on what rapidly turns into a funny and heartwarming adventure! A magical motion picture acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, CHILDREN OF HEAVEN is a charming treat you'll love too.
Majid Majidi celebrates the immediacy and essence of childhood in this delightful tale of a brother and sister who share a pair of shoes when the boy (though no fault of his own) loses his sister's only pair. Since their parents are too poor to afford a new pair, they keep it a secret, trading them off every day in a mad rush, jumping gutters and navigating the twisting lanes to their schools and back. Then the boy hatches a plan: the third-place prize in a student footrace is a new pair of shoes, and he's determined to take it. The plot may smack of a Disney film, but the direction couldn't be more different. The family scenes are delicately observed, and Majidi captures the spirit of the children perfectly: proud, emotional, petulant, sweet, and disarmingly sincere. The film has a Western-friendly framework without losing the naturalistic eye and lolling rhythm that gives the best Iranian films their richness. Even as he builds to the climactic footrace (quite unexpectedly turned into a nail-biting contest) the film continues to reveal a wealth of discreet surprises, culminating in a conclusion all the more resonant for its sublime delicacy. His efforts earned the film the honor of becoming the first Iranian feature to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. --Sean Axmaker
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| The Song Of Sparrows
List price: $26.98
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Brand: Koch International
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Iran’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar®. After Karim loses his job, he leaves his pastoral town and travels to Tehran where he finds work as a motorcycle taxi driver. Soon Karim becomes entangled in a world of hustle and greed and it’s up to his family to restore the values he once cherished.
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| Osama
List price: $14.98
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Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
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Inspired by a true story, this Golden GlobeÂ(r)-winning* drama is the first film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Hailed by critics as 'stunning (Entertainment Weekly), breathtaking (Slant) and 'emotionally charged (Screen International), Osama is a striking work of cinematic art (L.A. Weekly). After the brutal Taliban regime bans women from working and forbids them to leave their homes without a male escort, a 12-year old girland her mother find themselves on the brink of starvation. With nowhere left to turn, the mother disguises her daughter as a boy. Now called Osama, the young girl embarks on a terrifying and confusing journey as she tries to keep the Taliban from discovering her true identity. *2003: Foreign Language Film
The first movie produced by Afghanistan filmmakers after the fall of the Taliban, Osama is a searing portrait of life under the oppressive fundamentalist regime. Because women are not allowed to work, a widow disguises her young daughter (Marina Golbahari) as a boy so they won't starve to death. Simply walking the streets is frightening enough, but when the disguised girl is rounded up with all the boys in the town for religious training, her peril becomes absolutely harrowing. Golbahari's face--beautiful but taut with terror--is riveting. The movie captures both her plight and the miseries of daily life in spare, vivid images. At one point, her mother is nearly killed for exposing her feet while riding on the back of a bicycle; for the entire scene, the camera shows only her feet, with the spokes of the wheel radiating out behind as she lowers her burka over them. --Bret Fetzer
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| The Color of Paradise
List price: $24.96
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Brand: Unknown
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Mohammad returns home from a school for the blind, unaware that his widowed father plans to disown him in order to win the hand of a wealthy local woman.
Genre: Foreign Film - Other
Rating: PG
Release Date: 19-SEP-2000
Media Type: DVD
Majid Majidi, whose delightful Children of Heaven became the first Iranian film ever nominated for an Oscar, returns to the subject of children for this lush and lovely--if contrived--melodrama. A spirited blind boy with a passion for learning and life arrives home for a three-month break. He's loved by his giggly little sisters and adored by his gentle granny, but his widowed, self-pitying father sees him as a burden and is determined to foist him off on someone else before he remarries--specifically, a kindly blind carpenter who welcomes the boy with all his heart. Majidi is at his best exploring the texture of the boy's world--little hands feeling their way through a garden, the sounds of metal pencils punching out Braille pages, the shuffle of fingers on paper--and his imagery is delicate and lush. The story descends into scripted tragedy and a contrived, action-packed climax (unusual for a cinema known for its restraint), and the emotional tenor turns sentimental and cloying, but Majidi turns it all around with an astounding, heartbreakingly powerful final image. If there is one thing many Iranian films have in common, it's an unerring sense of how to end a film. This is one of the most affecting ever: beautiful, moving, simple, a glowing moment that crystallizes the entire movie. --Sean Axmaker
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| Kandahar
List price: $29.95
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Commentary by actress nelofer pazira this epic tale of hope & courage as an afghan born journalist returns to her homeland in a desperate attempt to reach her sister. Studio: New Yorker Films Video Release Date: 05/13/2003 Run time: 85 minutes Rating: Nr Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
The prolific Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh) had one of his most visible international successes with this haunting, open-ended drama. Set (and shot) during the Taliban era, it follows an Afghani-Canadian woman as she attempts to enter Afghanistan in search of a despondent sister. Since it is illegal for a woman to travel alone, she must rely on the kindness--or curiosity--of strangers, including a scrappy boy and a mysterious American doctor. The woman playing the lead role had earlier contacted Makhmalbaf about a similar real-life search, which prompted him to write the screenplay. The director doesn't really tell her story so much as he unveils a way of life: in the desert, we meet land-mine victims, Red Cross volunteers caught in a Catch-22 world, and women smothered in head-to-foot burkas. The portrait is one of oppression, but also of people furiously trying to get by. --Robert Horton
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| Baran
List price: $19.99
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Brand: Disney
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Winner for Best Film at the Montreal Film Festival, this wonderfully romantic and uplifting story is from the acclaimed director of the Academy Award(R) nominee CHILDREN OF HEAVEN (Best Foreign Language Film, 1999). In a Tehran building site, a 17-year-old Iranian named Lateef is known more for his playful antics than his hard work. Then things take an unexpected turn when an Afghan coworker falls from the building and the worker's son, Rahmat, enters the scene to become the new provider for his family. But even as Lateef finds himself irresistibly drawn to Rahmat, it's not until the revelation of Rahmat's secret (that he is actually a young woman, posing as a man) that both of their lives are forever changed! A humorous and moving love story of the most romantic kind -- critics everywhere have declared this delightfully entertaining motion picture as one not to be missed!
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| The Circle
List price: $24.98
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Brand: WELLSPRING/GENIUS
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A woman gives birth to a baby girl. Little does she know but she and her daughter are already unwanted.Three women are released from prison and their need for money leads them to take desperate measures.An unmarried woman seeking an abortion is rejected from her father's house by the violent threats of her brothers.Their crimes are vague their guilt or innocence unimportant.Their paths cross the suspense of their intrigues heightens. Their plights are often too tragically similar. Their world is one of constant surveillance bureaucracy and age-old inequalities. But this stifling world cannot extinguish the spirit strength and courage of the circle of women.System Requirements: Running Time 91 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN/LATIN Rating: NR UPC: 720917530727 Manufacturer No: FLV5307
It's a girl. The first words spoken in Jafar Panahi's The Circle should be celebratory, but instead the mood of the scene is mournful. The relatives will be furious. Director Jafar Panahi leaves the innocence of his delightful The White Balloon behind in this harrowing, passionate portrait of the plight women endured in Iran before the easing of strict Muslim law. His vision of women scrambling through streets and dodging cops like fugitives in a police state is more of a nightmarish fable than a realist drama, but no less affecting for it. Panahi drifts through the stories of a handful of women recently released from prison (their crimes are left ominously vague) with an easy grace and an angry sense of injustice that brings us full circle: back to prison, where a cell door shuts with a deafening clang that reverberates through the credits and beyond. --Sean Axmaker
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| Taste of Cherry - Criterion Collection
List price: $29.95
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Brand: ERSHADI,HOMAYON
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Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry is an emotionally complex meditation on life and death. Middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran-searching for someone to rescue or bury him. Criterion is proud to present the DVD premiere of Taste of Cherry in a beautiful widescreen transfer.
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for this contemplative film about a Muslim, Mr. Badi (Homayon Ershadi), who drives around the barren hills outside Tehran, flagging down passersby and offering good money for a simple job that he's hesitant to explain. He's planning his suicide and seeks someone to perform something of a symbolic eulogy. Most of his subjects refuse (personal morality aside, suicide is forbidden to Muslims), but he finds an elderly taxidermist (Abdolrahman Bagheri) who agrees only because he needs the money for an ill child. Yet the old man gently pleads with him to choose life, to embrace the joys of earthly existence, to remember the taste of cherries. Though initially greeted with critical acclaim, A Taste of Cherry received poor distribution in the U.S. The meandering, deliberately paced drama is composed of long conversations and long silences, and the camera is locked in the car for entire sequences, staring at the protagonists in still closeups with the dusty landscape rolling past the windows of the Land Rover in the background. Kiarostami's film is not for everyone, but if you can embrace the quiet power and grace of his deceptively simple style, the film becomes a remarkably rich celebration of human dignity and resilience. By the astonishing conclusion we can see past Badi's age-etched face to the soul peering out from behind his sad eyes. --Sean Axmaker
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| Close-Up
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Studio: Facets Multimedia Release Date: 02/19/2002 Run time: 100 minutes
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| Leila
List price: $29.95
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Reza and Leila, an attractive and affluent young couple deeply in love and recently married, discover that Leila is unable to conceive. Although Reza steadfastly insists that it matters not in the least, his mother feels otherwise: she is determined that her son have children and continue the family line. Invoking tradition, she convinces her daughter-in-law that Reza must, out of necessity, take a second wife to produce an heir. The heartbreak that follows is so eloquently recorded that the final outcome is "in a word, devastating." (The New York Times)
This provocative, eloquent and ultimately devastating story, from "Iran's longest-running cinematic master" (Village Voice), is a stunning portrayal of the clash between tradition and modern marriage; between manipulation and the power of love.
American audiences used to the fable-like Iranian films of Abbas Kairostami (A Taste of Cherry) and Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon) may be startled by Dariush Mehrjui's devastating modern melodrama, Leila. Set firmly in the urban world of contemporary Tehran, this story of a couple pressured by family and tradition into destroying their happy union is a window into a world uneasily straddling the past and present. Happily married but childless, Leila and Reza are pressured by Reza's mother to keep the family name alive. When Reza refuses to take a second wife (polygamy is still legal in Iran) the mother-in-law goes to work on Leila, beating down her resistance with a mix of pleading, haranguing, and outright lies, until the couple limply gives in. Mehrjui's subdued, subtle approach rolls with the gentle rhythms of a slow-paced society like many of his contemporaries, but underneath the surface calm is a churning sea of emotions: betrayal, abandonment, guilt, and grief. While the story can stand as a metaphor for the power of tradition in a modern world, Mehrjui's heart is with Leila's desperation and sorrow while she flails for support, even while helping choose her husband's bride. Dariush Mehrjui has been described as the godfather of Iranian cinema, and has repeatedly clashed with Iranian censors while pushing the envelope of social issues. This understated but vivid tragedy is witness to his place in cinematic history. --Sean Axmaker
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