Mehrdad Oskouei’s Retrospective at America’s Anthology Film Archive
TEHRAN.(Iranart) - A merica’s Anthology Film Archive is running a retrospective of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei.
Anthology Film Archives, based in New York, is an international center for the preservation, study and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental and avant-garde cinema.
Launched on February 23, the program is scheduled to run till February 28. On February 23 and 26, the theater of Anthology Film Archive screened Oskouei’s multi-award-winning documentary ‘Starless Dreams’, Mehr News Agency wrote.
The film plunges the viewer into the lives of seven young teenage girls sharing temporary quarters at a rehabilitation and correction center on the outskirts of Tehran. As the New Year approaches, the girls bond and reveal, with disarming and often playful honesty, the circumstances and acts that resulted in their incarceration. One girl killed her father; another robbed a bank; another was nabbed for carrying 651 grams of cocaine.
Starless Dreams got a theatrical release in the US last year, the American news and culture paper Village Voice wrote.
It is the final entry in a trilogy of works set in the rehabilitation center. The previous efforts, ‘It’s Always Late for Freedom’ (2007) and ‘The Last Days of Winter’ (2011), looked at the boys’ wing of the institution.
Oskouei says he was inspired to make Starless Dreams during the production of the earlier films: One day, he saw two young, seemingly innocent girls being led in shackles to another part of the facility behind a high wall; it was only then that he realized there also was a section for girls. Getting the permission to shoot there would take him seven years.
In all three films, Oskouei mixes interviews with the inmates, vignettes from their lives, and brief bits of stylization to create a tapestry of longing and self-negation. Each child that comes across Oskouei’s cameras seems to hover between a slow-burning desire for oblivion and a more immediate imperative to survive. They speak to him - at times calmly, at times tearfully - of molestation, poverty, addiction, even murder.
He shows them watching television and playing soccer, horsing around, fighting, screaming, calling home in agony; they are alternately scrappy and despondent, bursting with life and utterly devoid of hope. They want out, but they’re also afraid to leave. But they play, too.
On February 25, some of Oskouei’s other documentaries were screened at the America’s Anthology Film Archive including ‘Nose, Iranian Style’ (2005), ‘It’s Always Late for Freedom’, ‘The Other Side of Burka’ (2004) and ‘The Last Days of Winter’.
His documentaries are also scheduled to have another screening on February 28.
Born in Tehran, Oskouei, 47, is a film director, producer, photographer and researcher, who graduated in directing from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran. His films have been awarded at worldwide festivals.