myDylarama

Divorce, Iranian Style

Nisha Ramayya — 2015-10-27T19:16:02Z

In 2014, Sight & Sound asked 340 critics, programmers, and filmmakers to name the best documentaries ever made. This autumn, in partnership with Sight & Sound and Open City Docs, DocHouse is running a season of ‘Filmmakers' Favourites', inviting award-winning documentary filmmakers to present their choices from the poll. Director Brian Hill (Songbirds [2007], The Confessions of Thomas Quick [2015]) presents his choice, Kim Longinotto's 1988 film Divorce Iranian Style which she made in collaboration with legal anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini.

The film centres on a family court in Tehran, providing general insights into Islamic law and courthouse culture and the proceedings of six cases in which wives wish to divorce their husbands. According to the voiceover, Islamic law permits wives to petition for divorce only if they can prove their husbands' insanity, impotence or financial incapacity and while the six women express a range of motives for wishing to divorce, none of their reasons are considered legally valid. One woman has been forbidden from answering her home telephone for 30 years and is sick of her husband's suspicions and rules, of his insistence on religious and marital duties. Another, Maryam, divorced her husband and remarried for love. However, she forfeited her right to custody upon remarrying, and requires the court to move her first husband on her behalf. We also see the struggles of 16-year old Ziba who is miserable in her marriage to a man 20 years her elder and desperate to complete her education. In order to assert their rights and mobilise the law the women employ a variety of strategies - Massy is softly-spoken, she smiles and teases the court attendants; then she is persuasive and relentless, refusing to leave; then loud and aggressive, denouncing her husband for his ‘sexual problems'. Ziba claims that her husband physically abuses her; when he protests, she shushes him and promises to withdraw the claim once the divorce is underway. Maryam tears the court order in anger.

The women-only film crew become co-conspirators, aware that Maryam has torn the order (a punishable offence) but when they are drawn into the dispute, they claim to have seen nothing. This coheres with Longinotto's description of her documentary practice. In response to a question about her relationship with the subjects of her films, Longinotto explains: ‘I usually say we made the film together.' The subjects become collaborators. Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini are keen to represent the agency of the women in Divorce Iranian Style – as wives under Islamic law, as subjects in a documentary film with a predominantly Western audience. As Mir-Hosseini writes: ‘We had to distinguish what we (and we hoped our target audiences) saw as “positive" from what many people we talked to saw as “negative”, with the potential of turning into yet another sensationalized foreign film on Iran.' Divorce Iranian Style does not evade the inequalities of its female subjects, nor does it suggest that these women are simple, similarly victimised, or victims at all. Divorce, Iranian style, is complicated by culture, religious law, and legal bureaucracy, and the women manoeuvre these complexities with humour, wit, and perseverance.

The ‘Filmmakers' Favourites' season runs on Thursday afternoons (3.45pm) until early December at the Bertha DocHouse screen at the Curzon Bloomsbury. See DocHouse's website for more information:
http://www.dochouse.org/cinema/strand/filmmakersfavourites

The Company of Strangers - London Feminist Film Festival

Nisha Ramayya, Ryan Ormonde — 2015-08-22T07:45:27Z

The London Feminist Film Festival (20th-23rd August 2015) is a celebration of international feminist films past and present, established ‘to support women filmmakers in the male-dominated film industry and to inspire feminist discussion and critique.' The programme includes a documentary about female hip-hop artists in the UK, an event to raise funds for Rape Crisis England and Wales, a series of feminist shorts, and a screening of ‘feminist classic' The Company of Strangers, followed by a panel discussion with representatives from the Older Women in Film group and the Short Hot Flush Film Festival.

The Company of Strangers (1990), directed by Cynthia Scott, depicts the aftermath of a bus breakdown in rural Quebec. Eight women (seven elderly women and one younger woman) set up camp in an abandoned lake house, getting to know each other as they work together to survive for three days. Featuring non-professional actors and unscripted dialogue, this docu-fiction realises Scott's ambitions to make a work in which ‘every once and a while there would be a scene of such magic that whatever was happening on the screen was more than what was happening on the screen – […] a combination of the real humanity of the people and something happening because they were participating in a creative act which was the making of this movie.'

*
Do you hear the frogs?

No.

Do you hear the white-throated sparrow?

Yes.

The Company of Strangers sounds like singing: women singing while playing poker, singing while fixing the bus; some women singing so that others may dance.

They are singing love songs and songs of praise: Keep the love light glowing / In your eyes so true / Let me call you sweetheart / I'm in love with you.

Do you live alone?

When was the time you were most frightened?

Photographs of the women appear – an editorial element reinforcing the use of real people and their true stories.

They come in search of the best summers of her childhood.

Happy dancing
Happy hunting
Happy playing
Happy love – walking on air

There is the fear of being destitute, the fears that come to you when you're alone at home. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What will happen when they are no longer here, with their feet in the water?

You're alive – you can still love

Living and surviving
Living is communal – all of the women, except Alice, live alone.
Living and desires, dreams – all her desires have left her.
Living and fears
Living with women – living behind the closet door
Cissy: My grandchildren are my life, and my son, of course.
Beth: I've never been happy since my son died.
Mary: Constance is afraid of death, and so am I.
Alice: I'm not going to die, I'm going fishing.
Catherine: You don't let yourself be stopped by things.
Constance as one who is dying rather than living.

Living with or without heaven or god

We're alive!

Shouting out

All of the women, except Constance: Is anybody there? We're alive! We're all alive!

(She imitates the sparrow's song perfectly, but cannot hear its reply.)

What has been left out?
Leave it to the imagination, says Winnie. What is unfinished. The sense of a person, the missing details. Art. What you tell each other.

25 years later...

Alice

Constance

Winifred

Cissy

Mary

Catherine

Michelle

Beth

Dir., Cynthia Scott, 1990

Tea Time - Sheffield Doc/Fest

Nisha Ramayya — 2015-06-26T09:14:28Z

Tea Time opens with painted half-smiles on porcelain dolls, mint green buttercream and sugar pearls, strawberries, cherries, and slices of lemon. Women wear floral blouses, tweed jackets, long gold chains strung with turquoise beads, crucifix pendants, and coral nail varnish. María Teresa – the narrator, and director Maite Alberdi's grandmother – introduces her best friends. The one who was denied higher education; the one who never married, and doesn't like talking about love; the one who looks conservative, but is the most surprising; the one who likes everything to be perfect; the one who says what she likes, because her friends are forgiving. The grandfather clock strikes 5pm, and the ceremony begins.

Tea Time is a fly-on-the-wall style documentary about a group of Chilean women who have been meeting for monthly tea parties since they left school, over 60 years ago. Taking turns to host, the women sit around tables laden with avocado sandwiches, fruit tarts, and chocolate cakes, and talk to each other over cups of tea and the odd glass of brandy. María Teresa, Ximena, Alicia, Angélica, and Nina pause to say grace, after which there are very few pauses. Conversations unfold as the women update each other about their present lives, and remind each other about the past.

Lessons in home economics (a good mother is prudent, zealous, and hygienic); a classmate who believed hand-holding resulted in pregnancy; modern women and their lavish lives, and Blue Is The Warmest Colour; an upcoming day trip to Palomar; the dangers of idealising dead husbands; whether or not to wear funny hats at the next tea party; chemotherapy, cataracts, and memory loss; Laurence Olivier saying the words: ‘Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.'

Tea Time takes pleasure in the listening as much as the talk: reacting faces, blank, sympathetic, impatient, open mouths, getting ready to laugh, or correct. It is not always clear who is speaking, and who is speaking over. The limitations of subtitles transcribe one voice at a time, leaving unrepresented the layers of conversations, the interruptions and echoes. The tea parties are intended to be elegant affairs – despite a few provocatively liberal opinions on sex and politics (María Teresa admits that she is left-wing to annoy her friends), and the occasional funny hat – and Alberdi emphasises the women's make-up and good manners.

The women stop talking when the bell rings and the Peruvian servants refill teapots and clear dirty plates. Apparently, the servants have a habit of entering the room at particularly awkward points in the conversation: the dangers to a child's happiness and well-being when left in the care of servants; the diminishing value of virginity, whorehouses, and the maid of the house; a football match between Chile and Peru, at the moment Chile scores. These cuts are too purposeful for objective observation, but too subtle to provide social critique.

However, in the Director's Statement, Alberdi indicates that her primary interest is in the tea parties as ‘a rite of friendship', which enables ‘a female private space, from which life is interpreted'. This is an invitation-only rite, an exclusive space, a perspective sustained by intimacy and privilege: ‘We should all be so lucky to have these rituals, and the relationships they foment, in our lives.' As Tea Time suggests, the privilege of the rite of friendship does not depend on the sumptuousness of tea parties, but on the plainness of dependability itself.

Dir: Maite Alberdi, 2014

Burroughs: The Movie - Glasgow Film Festival

Nisha Ramayya — 2015-03-12T10:29:26Z

Burroughs: The Movie, directed by Howard Brookner, is a compilation of film footage, photographs, and sound recordings collected in St Louis, New York, Colorado, and London during 1978-1983. Aaron Brookner, the director's nephew, raised funds to restore and rerelease the documentary on the occasion of Burrough's 100th birthday in 2014 (Howard Brookner died in 1989, Burroughs died in 1997). On the Kickstarter webpage, Aaron explains his motivations: ‘[Burroughs'] thoughts are still an inspiration which define counter-culture and fill us with un-paralleled insights into the world as it is today and it is important to preserve his wisdom for younger generations. William S. Burroughs was the real Pope of Beats and Punks. He predicted the electronic revolution, invented remixes (he called them cut-ups) before remixing even existed, and was a visionary captured beautifully in this film.'

Burroughs sits at a desk and reads extracts from Naked Lunch and Nova Express. ‘Get me a new scalpel, this one has no edge to it!'

Allen Ginsberg says: ‘Kerouac said that Burroughs was the most intelligent man in America and I probably repeated that a million times.'

Brion Gysin says: ‘He could punch a typewriter or he could punch a tape recorder to death.'

Do you know which line of yours Kerouac liked the best? Do you remember the characters we used to play? [A well-groomed Hungarian, an Edith Sitwell part, a Baroness.]

Burroughs likes to sing sentimental songs, he sings ‘Adios Muchachos' very loudly.
Burroughs looks into the camera and says: ‘A buxom Irish maid, as I remember, said that she had heard that opium gives people pleasant, beautiful dreams.'

William Burroughs says that Joan Vollmer says: ‘You're supposed to be a faggot but you're as good as a pimp in bed.'

[‘I went back to Mexico City and saw Joan Burroughs leaning forwards in a garden chair, arms on her knees. She studied me with clear eyes and a downcast smile, her face restored to a fine beauty tequila and salt had made strange before the bullet in her brow.']

Burroughs lives in Tangier. He sends his son copies of Rimbaud, shrunken heads, beautiful Amazonian butterflies in little glass cases, and things like that. [Billy is the last beatnik, he admires his father, he writes. Bill is ambivalent. How does Bill feel?]
He closes his eyes, smokes, adjusts his coat. He places his hands on a newspaper; a boy smiles. ‘Play it all, play it all, play it all back. Pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back.'

His writing is an autobiographical as anyone's. [‘I wonder what ever happened to Otto's boy who played the violin?'] [‘His name was Harold.'] [‘He's been dead a long time.']

Burroughs wears a snap brim fedora, grey gloves, a taupe suit, a red tie, glasses, surgical gloves, a head mirror. He washes a suction cup in a toilet bowl. He might have been the head of the CIA.

Burroughs' mouth twitches in St Louis, where his fears no longer bother him.

Dir. Howard Brookner, 1983

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence - Glasgow Film Festival

Nisha Ramayya — 2015-03-05T21:00:05Z

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is ‘the final part of a trilogy about being a human being', divided into over 30 self-contained scenes. In his note of intention, director Roy Andersson lists his influences: Bruegel the Elder's painting ‘Hunters in the Snow', in which four birds seem to observe a village scene from above; the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) art movement, which emerged in response to the abstract, romantic, and idealised aspects of Expressionism; and Homer's Odyssey, and its fantastic, wandering yet coherent narrative structure (www.royandersson.com/pigeon)
.
A man gazes at a pigeon sitting on display in a museum. This must be the eponymous subject, everything must return to this point.

Death happens in the middle, with an almost pop, a mewl, a little bother.

Love clutches like death; the conversation revolves around hands.

What do your heroes do for a living?

The walls are beige, pale yellow, and complicated by pinpricks.

A woman on the other side of the flamenco lesson: ‘I'm happy to hear you're doing fine.'
A lonely officer on the other side of again.

Kissing continues, and the soldiers march into battle.

Can you read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps?

Kissing continues, and you cannot imagine what the old man hears.

Kissing continues, and it is Wednesday once more.

‘Abstraction is to be condensed, purified, and simplified', for example, a bag full of laughs, an unclaimed sandwich, a melodious abomination, a large black dog as it curls.

Isn't it nice, to be the only person who notices, to make meaning through perforation.

Uncle One Tooth places his head in his hands: ‘Humans do not see an approaching apocalypse.'

Little girls blow bubbles on the balcony, this is a corner piece.

Disappointment is an accumulation of early nights and other people's lowered voices – everything that slips between the experience and its description.

What colours do you associate with the word ‘lugubrious'?

Dir. Roy Andersson, 2014

Appropriate Behaviour - Glasgow Film Festival

Nisha Ramayya — 2015-03-02T16:44:32Z

Appropriate Behaviour is the first feature film from Desiree Akhavan, who writes, directs, and stars in this self-consciously superficial study of identity politics. The protagonist interrupts a discussion about bias against the queer community in the criminal justice system to make herself known and to make her ex-girlfriend Maxine jealous: ‘I thought we were going to talk about marginalised women today – '‘My name is Shirin. I am an Iranian bisexual teacher and I would like to take you out for a drink.' Shirin is a marginalised woman – the film highlights the many communities in which she does not fit in – and she is eager to submit herself as a case study.

Appropriate Behaviour engages with a number of identities: Iranian American (‘Shirin? What is that, Libyan, Armenian, Argentinian? Iranian, wow! Iran! What do you think of that whole situation?' ‘It's a mixed bag.'); bisexual (‘I know that I don't look like I'm into girls, and I was just talking about being a boner killer, but I am super sexy and super into girls.'); gender-normative woman (‘You know it's like I didn't think I deserved a bra because I don't see myself as a real woman.'); and middle class (Giambattista Valli dresses the actress who plays Shirin's mother).

Shirin stumbles through categories, dragging markers from one scene into the next. Shirin and Maxine attend an Iranian New Year party, depicted as an abundance of floating candles, jewel-tone dresses, goldfish, selfie-smiles, and a fire-jumping ceremony that shimmers in purple (‘Liberace's wet dream'). Maxine criticises Shirin's relationship with gay culture in a club filled with metallic balloons, rainbow flags, wigs and feather boas, and illicit kisses exposed under pink lights. Maxine destroys the underwear she had bought for Shirin after an argument about lesbian orphanhood and coming out, which leads Shirin to try on a pastel peach corset in a boutique lingerie shop. Surrounded by white lace and orange curtains, pastries and fruit arranged on tiered platters, and silver photograph frames, Shirin deceives her family.

Although Appropriate Behaviour is ostensibly about love and heartbreak, Akhavan suggests that the key relationship is between Shirin and her various selves. Shirin and Maxine's relationship serves as a point of intersection between identities, and the film follows its protagonist as she constructs and deconstructs herself with awkwardness, insight, and coordinating colours.

Dir. Desiree Akhavan, 2014

Queens of Syria - Glasgow Film Festival

Nisha Ramayya — 2015-02-28T15:33:25Z

Photo credit: Lynn Alleva Lilley

Queens of Syria documents the first stage of the ongoing Syrian Trojan Women project, which began in Amman, Jordan, late 2013 (www.syriatrojanwomen.org). Through a combination of drama therapy and revisionist mythology, a team of theatre professionals work with a group of displaced Syrian women to develop a production of Euripides' The Trojan Women. This tragedy recounts the consequences of the Trojan War for the women of Troy, focussing on four characters in particular: Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen. Their homes are in flames, their lovers slain, their children lost. The women themselves are conquered, their fates in the hands of the men who have claimed them. Euripides imagines the women as they prepare for marriage, slavery, and death. As classicist Gilbert Murray notes, the play has been condemned for being too harrowing, although the strength of the characters may provide solace: ‘The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of all the familiar lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a suggestion that in the utterness of night, when all fears of a possible worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory.' The ending of the Syrian women's production of The Trojan Women is not shown, but the project itself does not conclude with the documentary; the production has been invited to tour internationally, and a new theatre production, an audio drama series, and a feature film are in development.

Queens of Syria indicates the tensions that might exist between poetry and myth, drama and documentary, realism and romance, without attempting to analyse or simplify the lived experiences of the Syrian women. During a drama therapy session, the women are encouraged to map their respective journeys on flip-chart paper: write ‘home' at the top of the page, draw circles around the things you left behind, draw arrows between each point of your ongoing exile. Sheets of paper fill with shapes and movements, lists of imaginable and unimaginable loss run off each page: personal belongings, loved ones, places, certainties, memories, aspirations. One woman asks how she can dream when she sleeps on a mattress in unfamiliar surroundings. She and her husband explain that they spent years building a home for their family, a home they cannot return to, a home they will never enjoy as they imagined they would. Write ‘dream' at the top of the page, draw circles around the phantoms that remain.

The Greek herald Talthybius warns the Trojan women that ‘Each hath her own. Ye go not in one herd.' Queens of Syria reflects on a situation that is shared and irreducible to a single narrative. Every week the number of women participating in the project decreases, from over 60 to under 25. Reasons for leaving the project differ, but a sense of fear dominates: fear of forgetting lines, fear of being on stage, fear that faces and names will be revealed, fear that husbands will disapprove, fear of political consequences. The documentary observes the varying practices of self-sacrifice and self-protection within and without the parameters of the performance. Murray describes The Trojan Women as ‘something more than art': ‘It is also a prophecy, a bearing of witness.' Hecuba cries: ‘O hear her! She must never die unheard!' Queens of Syria presents an opportunity to pay attention, to listen, and to record cultural memory and personal experience, demonstrating the interrelated necessities of preservation and reimagining.

Dir. Yasmin Fedda, 2014

Bibliography

Murray, Gilbert, The Trojan Women of Euripides (Project Gutenberg, 2011) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35171/35171-h/35171-h.htm