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This appears to be yet another Iranian movie featuring a boy as the central character. I've not heard mention of it before...  I wonder how we missed it?

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Don (aka Daan  2001)
Reviewed by David Wood
Updated 6 February 2001 


Perhaps Iran's most radical director, Abolfazi Jalili's reputation is perhaps less established than that of contemporaries such as Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. "Don" sees Jalili taking his criticisms of modern Iranian society to new heights with a tale of individual freedom which focuses on Farhad (Bahremand), a nine-year-old illiterate boy whose education is abandoned when he is forced to undertake menial labour in order to support himself and his family. Farhad's very existence is denied by the authorities who wish to take him into care as his father (a similarly uneducated heroin addict) failed to report his birth and so obtain the all important identity card that would allow Farhad to take his place in society.

Bahremand is outstanding as the work-hungry, resourceful juvenile in the central role in what is an urgent, profoundly moving look at identity, responsibility and the value of education. Much like Samira Makhmalbaf's recent "Blackboards", Jalili with both precision and economy questions the morality of a society that could so easily abandon and betray its youth. "Don" is also one of the few films to dare to raise the question of addiction in a religiously fundamental community.

Intelligent, thought-provoking fare which is charged with a naturalism reminiscent of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows", "Don" is a classic of its kind and evidence of a major director whose work (which includes "Det Means Girl" and "Dance Of Dust") is still waiting to be discovered by the mainstream

Blackboards (2000)
Reviewed by David Wood
Updated 19 December 2000      

Iranian Kurdistan, near the border with Iraq. A group of displaced teachers - who carry their blackboards strapped to their backs for protection from an unseen military enemy - wander the barren, mountainous terrain in search of much-needed pupils with whom they wish to swap education for sustenance.

Following an attack from an army helicopter the teachers become separated. One, Said (Mohamadi), falls in with a group of nomads from Iraq trying to make their perilous way back home. Winning the trust of the group by using his board as transport for an elderly member of the group, Said, then attempts to win the hand of the old man's daughter Hahaleh (Jafari) by offering his board as dowry. Meanwhile, Reeboir (Ghobadi), another teacher, finds himself amongst a party of boys trying to smuggle contraband goods across the border.

Makhmalbaf's follow-up to her debut, the astonishing "The Apple" - made at the tender age of 18 - is further evidence of the arrival of a major and astoundingly mature new voice in Iranian cinema. Continuing her working relationship with her father, the acclaimed director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who here edits and contributed the screenplay, Samira Makhmalbaf has fashioned an intelligent, multi-layered and profoundly humanist (not to mention gently political) meditation on the values of knowledge, education, and the affects of cultural and geographical displacement.

Makhmalbaf and Director of Photography Ebrahim Ghafouri make the most of the arduous filming conditions to create a visual canvas both tellingly realistic - the sense of suffering and hardship is intense - and yet at times distinctly surreal, in which the literal and the metaphorical magically entwine. Powered by naturalistic performances from her troupe of largely non-professional actors and shot through with a devastating undercurrent of pessimism, "Blackboards" is likely to be one of the most original and potent movies of the year.

I have seen Blackboards (6/10), but Daan has only been an entry on my wish list for a long while. Iranian film has enjoyed much better distribution in the US the last few years, but this film was made before that time and will likely be hard to find.