The course is instructed by Russel Barsh and Madrona Murphy.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran’s most influential post-Revolutionary director, best known in the West for his 2001 film Kandahar, is represented in the course by two films: his autobiographical Moment of Innocence, which ponders his own violent participation as a student in the Iranian Revolution; and Gabbeh, a visually rich appreciation of tribal peoples in northern Iran. Also included is his daughter Samira Makhmalbaf’s treatment of the 9/11 tragedy through the eyes of Afghan refugee children. Mohsen and Samira have both received UNESCO’s Federico Fellini medal for their films.
The ambiguous and still evolving status of women in modern Iran is explored in Tahmineh Milani’s The Fifth Reaction, which the instructors describe as “a feminist car chase movie” set in Iran’s Persian Gulf Coast; Offside, a quirky 2006 film by Jafar Pahani about Iranian girls trying to crash the gate at the 2006 World Cup soccer championship match in Tehran; and the surreal imagery of The Day I Became A Woman, the cinematic debut of Makhmalbaf’s wife Marzieh Meshkini.
Bahram Beizai’s Bashu examines the social toll of the Iran-Iraq war, as well as the ethnic fractures of rural Iran, while the documentary Our Times, by activist director Rakshan Bani-Etehad, documents the enthusiasm and disillusionment of young Iranians as they struggled for a greater role in national politics during the 2001 elections.
Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, who recently achieved critical recognition in the West for his film about Kurdish refugee children, Turtles Can Fly, is represented by an earlier tragicomic work, Marooned in Iraq, populated by an endearingly bizarre family of Kurdish folk musicians.
The interested people can register for this course through Skagit Valley Community College’s San Juan Center, either in person or by mail.
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