A Time for Rage
As seen through Rafi Pitt's camera, Tehran seems oppressive and hostile: a monstrous place, empty of people, in which huge motorways wind their way past grey housing blocks and lifeless concrete suburban housing estates. Ali's life seems just as hopeless. He's a former convict who's managed to find a job as a night watchman. And that means he scarcely ever gets to see his wife Sara and his six-year-old daughter Saba. When he has some time off, Ali goes hunting. Whatever life throws at him, he seems to accept it with the same stoic lack of expression.
Then Ali comes home from work one day to find his flat devastated. Eventually, he finds out that his wife and daughter have been killed in the course of a gun-battle between police and demonstrators. Their death is "collateral damage" for which no-one feels responsible. Ali is merely informed that the two found themselves between the two fronts. An official tells him, "Only an autopsy can show whether the bullets came from the police or the demonstrators."
After days of painful bureaucratic chicanery, he is taken to identify the bodies – first of his wife, then of his daughter. He remains laconic and cool; no-one expresses any sympathy.
Ticking bomb
The fact that his wife and daughter have been killed seems to provoke no visible emotion in Ali. He goes home, collects his gun and climbs to the top of a hill on the edge of Tehran, where the multi-lane highways curve in and out of each other. He follows the cars at random through his gun-sight, his finger on the trigger.
As a police car happens to pass, he fires. One of the officers is seriously injured and tries to drag himself out of his vehicle. Ali kills him on the ground with a single well-aimed shot. The audience is watching what seems like an execution; for Ali, it's time to vent his wrath.
At the International Berlin Film Festival, where "Shekarchi" had its world premiere, Rafi Pitts described his main character as a "ticking bomb." "He is oppressed, he is not free, he has to work at nights and he can't live the life he would like to live. And he only wants something very simple: he just wants to spend more time with his wife and daughter, that's all. And when they too are taken from him, he goes crazy."
Scraping past the censor
It was quite remarkable that Pitts' film was even able to be shown at the Berlin Film Festival. Pitts says he had to spend several months convincing the censor to pass his screenplay. The authorities decided that the film was not worthy of support. They gave it Category C approval, which meant that Pitts could make the film, but he wouldn't get any help from the state.
Perhaps that's why Pitts' accusations against the system aren't immediately apparent. "Shekarchi" is a quiet film, in which dramatic situations are laconically underplayed. Its main character is uncommunicative and grim-faced, and the audience never feels that it has really got to know him. But behind the somewhat awkward dramatic style of the film there's a symbolic level: the long periods of waiting in official corridors, the unforgiving interrogation to which Ali is subjected, the concrete desert which is what we see of Tehran, or the gloomily poetic, highly composed pictorial language become a parable of a society which has rigidified, politically and socially.
The hunter's blind anger is not just a reaction to the death of his family; it also reflects his feeling of powerlessness. And his loaded weapon seems like an answer to an aggressive regime which punishes those who disagree with it, kills its opponents and holds on to power with all its might.
Surprisingly topical
The events of June 12th 2009 have given the film, which is a German-Iranian co-production, a sudden topicality. People in Iran are still going out on to the streets to protest against Mahmud Ahmedinejad's claims of victory in the election. They're still dying; opposition members are still being arrested.
"We had our permits to film long before all of this," says Rafi Pitts. "It was coincidence that we were filming during the elections. And it's obvious that, if demonstrations are going on, that fact might well have an influence on the film."
Since the Berlin Film Festival, the regime has sharply increased the pressure on internationally recognised Iranian film-makers. Mehdi Pourmoussa, who was Pitts' assistant on "Shekarchi," was arrested and subsequently released. The director Jafar Panahi, who won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his football film "Offside," is currently in prison.
And Pitts himself, who was born in Iran in 1967, but who also lives in France and Britain, isn't taking the risk of going back home.
Ina Rottscheidt
© Deutsche Welle / Qantara.de 2010
Editor: Lewis Gropp
Translated from the German by Michael Lawton
Qantara.de
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