It's Winter (Pitts, 2006): ICA Cinema, 5.45pm
This is a 35mm presentation.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Rafi Pitts and preceded by a screening of Mahyar Mandegar's short film White Winged Horse. This film is presented by Cinema Tehran.
Time Out review:
Kicking off with memorably beautiful music and images, this third fiction feature from Rafi Pitts
– a London-educated Iranian whose previous film was a documentary on
Abel Ferrara – is a stylish, confident fable that at first comes across a
little like a reworking of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. After a
man recently made jobless takes a train to seek work abroad, his
attractive young wife (Mitra Hadjar), daughter and mother are left to
fend for themselves in their small home on the edge of town. Months pass
with no news of the husband; understandably, doubts arise as to whether
he’s even still alive, and life gets harder. Meanwhile, a handsome but
feckless mechanic (Ali Nicksolat) who’s new to town notices the woman
now rumoured to be a widow, and starts hanging around in the hope of
catching her attention. The crucial difference here from the
James M Cain story is that Pitts never plays this situation for
suspense, other than how the heroine will respond to her suitor’s
advances. Still, the film is as specifically aligned to its setting as
Cain’s novel was to southern California, and it reflects on how poverty,
unemployment and the need to seek work elsewhere affect Iranian
families. That, however, makes it all sound too analytically political,
for it’s a determinedly lyrical meditation on how economic factors and
loneliness may influence both social and sexual relationships. Happily,
sturdy performances all round ensure the film feels real rather than
merely ‘poetic’, and even though it doesn’t pack a particularly strong
punch in emotional terms, it’s an impressively intelligent piece of
work, and well worth catching.
Geoff Andrew
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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