Event detail
Blackboards
Film - Feature | October 6 | 5:30-7 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
BAMPFA
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The starkly desolate mountains of Kurdish Iran serve as backdrop for Samira Makhmalbafs second feature, which follows a group of itinerant teachers, heavy blackboards on their backs, trudging through the landscape in search of pupils. Education seems like a dream to those they meet, however, who think blackboards are better used as a gurney for a sick man, or as shields from gunfire. Makhmalbaf punctures documentary-like observational footage with startling, almost hallucinogenic moments (almost like an art installation in the desert, as The Guardians Peter Bradshaw wrote). The result is both a realist portrait of nomadic Kurdish culture and an absurdist, Beckett-like allegory, all set in a landscape that would turn even John Fords eye. There is something distinctively surreal and almost ludic about Makhmalbafs vision that envelops its elements of pathos and political anger in a sheen of mystery and enigma, Bradshaw noted. The poetry and tenderness of her film are compelling.
CA, bampfapress@berkeley.edu, 5106420808