Reza Mirkarimi's Today

Iran's submission for this year's Best Foreign Film at the Academy awards is Reza Mirkarimi's Today. As one of the country's most remarkably consistent filmmakers, his films have twice been submitted for Oscar consideration – though not his best, breakout feature, Under the Moonlight. He had no luck with So Far, So Close and his second chance, A Cube of Sugar, was taken away from him after Iran took back its submission as a result of a boycott. 

Today tells the story of a taxi driver, Younes (played by legendary actor, Parviz Parastuyi), who forms a mysterious relationship with one of his passengers, an injured, pregnant woman. A subtle, slow narrative with a taciturn protagonist typical of Mirkarimi's characters, the film gradually builds momentum toward a richly moving finale that works both within the emotional scope of the film and the grander, allegorical meanings that critics have ascribed to it. It is one of the strongest films of the year. 

I saw the film at TIFF and discussed it on the Hello Cinema Podcast – which, as you already know, I co-host with Tina Hassannia about Iranian cinema. I also had the pleasure of interviewing the director during the festival. I have written about the film twice this week: a transcript of my conversation with Mirkarimi is up at Hello Cinema; a short column about the film's Oscar chances is at The Film Experience. Be sure to give both of them a read!

Amir Sat on a Branch Reflecting on TIFF

*This column was originally published at The Film Experience.

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence

You may have noticed that after a few years of covering the festival to various degrees for The Film Experience, I was completely absent from this space for the past ten days, mostly because of a personal decision to enjoy the films without sweating over writing. TIFF is a big festival, maybe the most frantic and hectic in the world, with more choices than one can physically experience over ten days. Nathaniel and I shared so few films from the program’s sprawling lineup, we could have each written about every single thing we saw and you’d never know we attended the same festival. It’s this overwhelming scale that made me want to take a break from reporting, and yet, I feel unsure about how that affected my festival experience.

Writing about films for me is a passion born out of the necessity to articulate my thoughts on the things I watch. Maybe that process of writing makes the films more memorable? Isn’t it so that writing, even about bad films, makes us appreciate good cinema all the more? Without recording my memories, details about this year’s films have fled my mind quicker than ever. My feelings about some of them have been diluted a bit, too. There is something missing, even though I had the best festival experience of my life, meeting more people than ever and watching some terrific films. Maybe this pessimism is just a withdrawal symptom. Let’s stay positive!

As has become something of an unplanned tradition for me – with precedents including Oslo, August 31st and Closed Curtain – my favorite film of the festival came my way on the last day. The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to The Act of Killing is a remarkable achievement, one that I dare say, with festival hyperbole now fully behind me, is one of the best documentary films ever made. Where the original film shocked its audience with both the viciousness of the story and the inventiveness of its approach, this sequel of sorts is rather more formally straightforward. Turning his camera 180º to focus on the victims of the Indonesian massacre of the 1960s, Oppenheimer examines unhealed wounds and social and familial fractures that are still silenced decades on. The Look of Silence is no less brutal than its predecessor, yet, its emotional punch comes not by shock, but from the force of personal traumas visible in the victims’ silent looks.