Golden Bear-winning Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has made an impassioned plea on behalf of the Iranian protestors who are being massacred by the country’s security authorities after rising against the government.
Speaking after the world premiere of his latest film Sense Of Water at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on January 30, Rassoulof told the packed audience at Rotterdam’s Oude Luxor cinema of his mounting despair about events in recent weeks that have seen tens of thousands of Iranians killed by the Islamic Republic’s security forces.
“I’ve always been a very hopeful person, and I have always encouraged others to find a creative outlet to transmute their pain into art,” he said. “But now I have a profound feeling of absurdity and meaninglessness.”
“What is happening at the moment in Iran goes way beyond national identity. It’s a question of humanity,” he continued. “What the Islamic Republic is doing in Iran at the moment is something absolutely inhumane. I hope that form of governance finds its end as soon as possible.”
Sense Of Water, which has a running time of 40 mins, is sold by Films Boutique and produced through Run Way Pictures. The partially autobiographical tale is Rasoulof’s first film to shoot outside Iran. It tells the story of an Iranian writer, played by Ali Nourani, who has just moved to Germany. As he learns a new language and plans a new book, he begins an affair with a woman but the pain of exile puts the relationship under severe strain. Behnush Najibi co-stars
Rasoulof said the film was inspired by a personal experience the director had in London when he took a shower. “I had a very strange feeling I had felt that water on my body before, and so I tried to remember where I had felt it. I realised, thinking and thinking, that there was exactly the same kind of water when I was in the prison in Iran a year and a half earlier.”
Lead actor Nourani has also spent time in prison after taking part in protests as part of the Women Life Freedom movement.
Working in exile
Sense Of Water screened alongside four other films, Behnush Najibi’s Rotation, Mo Harawe’s Whispers Of A Burning Scent, Hasan Kattan’s Allies In Exile and Shahrbanoo Sadat’s Super Afghan Gym.
They are the first titles supported by the IFFR’s Displacement Film Fund, which grants production funds of €100,000 to displaced filmmakers or filmmakers with a proven track record in creating authentic storytelling on the experiences of displaced people.
Rasoulof paid tribute to the IFFR and to Cate Blanchett, the actor, producer and global Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, who is one of the driving forces behind the Fund, for “convincing me to make a film I really didn’t feel I could do and didn’t want to…but they were very persuasive”.
“I left Iran a year and a half ago, overland, over the mountains, illegally,” he recalled. “I wanted to break this myth that when an artist leaves his homeland, they are no longer able to make any meaningful work.”
All five of the DFF films received a rapturous reception in Rotterdam. A second round of the grant scheme was announced earlier in the week.
At the end of the evening, Blanchett was invited by IFFR managing director Clare Stewart, to articulate what the five films mean to her.
“These are complex narratives that have been realised in an incredibly short period of time,” said Blanchett. “I think that speaks to the passion…and to how much these stories have been bottling up inside the filmmakers. It’s hard enough to make a film in so-called ordinary circumstances but to make them in such extraordinary circumstances, when you’re outside your culture, outside of your filmmaking practice, and give them to us in such a generous way, speaks to your incredible heart.
“When you see these stories on the big screen, you realise how much we all have in common,” Blanchett continued. ”There are so few places now where we can gather and celebrate difference rather than shoot one another because we are frightened of that difference.
“The filmmakers have lived experience of geographic and cultural displacement and what that does to one’s spirit. But we are all at risk of being displaced from our humanity. We do so at our peril. Cinema allows us to reconnect.”
No comments yet