"My style is inspired by the Koran, insofar as it moves from realism to surrealism. Just as in our holy text the human and the divine co-exist, so in my stories the real and the surreal may be found side by side, resulting in a personal narrative technique."
-Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1991
Mohsen Makhmalbaf is Iran's most audacious stylist and, with Abbas Kiarostami, one of the two great Iranian directors to have made their indelible mark as world cinema masters. Makhmalbaf has had an evolving and complex relationship with his society and with cinema, and this first PFA retrospective provides a fascinating tour of his thought and art.
Born in Tehran in 1957, Makhmalbaf joined a militant political group while still in his teens and spent five brutal years in the Shah's prisons, freed only by the 1979 revolution. He became a playwright, novelist, and finally, film director, for many years serving as head of the Bureau of the Islamic Arts and Thought, which challenged artists to create a cinema of ideas, as he himself has done. He has shown at every major international film festival, winning over a hundred awards.
If Iranians are “mad” about movies, in both senses of the word, Makhmalbaf himself has run the gamut from reviling the cinema, as an Islamic radical, to making a deep commitment to it. (Ironically, he has seen several of his films banned). One of his most eloquent subjects is the chord cinema touches in a people looking for a way into their society, but another topic is society itself, and problems such as poverty, exploitation, and intolerance that did not disappear with the Islamic revolution. Mixing irony and humanism, grotesquerie and lyricism, his films are unique in their ability to reflect upon cinema, its power and its promise.
