Plot summary on imdb
Naderi’s second film is set in the slums of Tehran. Hanging out in a pool hall, Ali Khoshdast becomes involved in a brawl with three brothers, and accidently kills one of them. He runs for his life, eventually taking refuge in the home of a young woman. The victim’s brothers continue the chase, and finally close in on him. Following the murder, streets, alleys and houses that were all part of Ali’s everyday world suddenly become dangerous and hostile. Although in many ways a classic tale of revenge, Naderi uses this story to imply that an underlying violence pervades society, ready to burst forth with or without justification. Written by Anonymous

http://nitroflare.com/view/6AD51D1B8C9A62D/19730000_-_Tangna_%28Strait%29_%28Amir_Naderi%2C_1973%29.avi

https://publish2.me/file/de911ff113b94/19730000_-_Tangna_%28Strait%29_%28Amir_Naderi%2C_1973%29.mp4

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:None

جاده‌های کیارستمی

Abbas Kiarostami has recently been exhibiting his black-and-white landscape photographs at venues around the world, and Roads of Kiarostami is both a companion piece to these exhibits and an extension of them. Static shots of his photos alternate with footage of Kiarostami’s car winding through mountain roads, as the Iranian filmmaker muses in voice-over on the significance of the journey and on the path of his work and Persian literature as a whole.

http://nitroflare.com/view/86B733CACFE7EE1/Roads_of_Kiarostami__Abbas_Kiarostami__2006.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/1b70e1843afc3/Roads_of_Kiarostami_%5BAbbas_Kiarostami%5D_2006.mp4

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

Synopsis:
In a Tehran hospital, a woman awaits anxiously for news about her grandchild – and she’s shattered when she learns that the baby is a girl. Outside the hospital are three young women – they’re anxious, fearful – and their attempts to leave the city are constantly thwarted. One of them, Nargess, tries unsuccessfully to make contact with her friend, Pari, who is recently out of prison and has been thrown out of her family home. Pregnant and desperate, Pari seeks help from Monir, a friend married to a Pakistani doctor.

In addition to these frightened, disenfranchised women we meet Nayereh, who is forced to abandon her little girl, and Mojgan, a prostitute. As the story spirals from one character to another, it eventually turns full circle.

Review:

Few things reveal a nation better than what it censors. In America, the MPAA has essentially eliminated adult sexuality from our movies, but smiles on violence and films tailored for the teenage toilet-humor market. Now consider “The Circle,” a film banned in Iran. There is not a single shot here that would seem offensive to a mainstream American audience–not even to the smut-hunting preacher Donald Wildmon. Why is it considered dangerous in Iran? Because it argues that under current Iranian law, unattached women are made to feel like hunted animals.

There is no nudity here. No violence. No drugs or alcohol, for sure. No profanity. There is a running joke that the heroines can’t even have a cigarette (women cannot smoke in public). Yet the film is profoundly dangerous to the status quo in Iran because it asks us to identify with the plight of women who have done nothing wrong except to be female. “The Circle” is all the more depressing when we consider that Iran is relatively liberal compared to, say, Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Jafar Panahi’s film begins and ends with the same image, of a woman talking to someone in authority through a sliding panel in a closed door. In the opening shot, a woman learns that her daughter has given birth to a girl when the ultrasound promised a boy; she fears angry reprisals from the in-laws. In the closing shot, a woman is in prison, talking to a guard. In closing the circle, the second shot suggests that women in strict Muslim societies are always in prison in one way or another.

The film follows a series of women through the streets of a city. We follow first one and then another. We begin with two who have just been released from prison–for what crime, we are not told. They want to take a bus to a city where one of them hopes to find a safe harbor. But they have no money and lack the correct identification. They run through the streets and down back alleys at the sight of policemen, they crouch behind parked cars, they ask a ticket seller to give them a break and sell them a ticket even though they have no ID. At one point it’s fairly clear that one of the women prostitutes herself (off-screen) to raise money to help the other. Men all over the world are open-minded about exempting themselves from the laws prohibiting other men from frequenting prostitutes.

If you have no ID, you cannot leave town. If you have no ID, you cannot live in a town. Your crime, obviously, is to be a woman living outside the system of male control of women; with a husband or a brother to vouch for you, you can go anywhere, sort of like baggage. The argument is that this system shows respect for women, just as Bantustans in South Africa gave Africans their own land, and American blacks in Jim Crow days did not have to stand in line to use white restrooms. There is a universal double-speak in which subjugation is described as freedom.

We meet another woman, who has left her little daughter to be found by strangers. She hides behind a car, her eyes filled with tears; as a single mother she cannot care for the girl, and so dresses her up to look nice, and abandons her. We meet another woman, a prostitute, who is found in the car of a man and cannot prove she is related to him. She is arrested; the man seems to go free. Has there ever been a society where the man in this situation is arrested and the woman goes free? The prostitute at least gets to smoke on the prison bus (not when she wants to, but after the men light up, so the smoke will not be noticed).

The movie is not structured tautly like an American street thriller. There are hand-held shots that meander for a minute or two, just following women as they walk here or there. The women seem aimless. They are. In this society, under their circumstances, there is nowhere they can go and nothing they can do, and almost all of the time they have to stay out of doors. They track down rumors: A news vendor, for example, is said to be “friendly” and might help them. From time to time, a passing man will say something oblique, like “Can I help you?” But that is either casual harassment or a test of availability.

The Iranian censors may ban films like “The Circle,” but it got made, and so did the recent “The Day I Became a Woman,” about the three ages of women in such a society. One suspects that videotapes give these films wide private circulation; one even suspects the censors know that. I know a director from a communist country where the censor had been his film-school classmate. He submitted a script. The censor read it and told his old friend, “You know what you’re really saying, and I know what you’re really saying. Now rewrite it so only the audience knows what you’re really saying.”
—————————————————————————————————————————
Extras included:

1. Interview with Jafar Panahi (in Parsi with hardcoded English subtitles)
2. Trailer (in English)

http://nitroflare.com/view/AFA709FAB5EEA88/The_Circle_%28Dayereh%29_%282000%29_–_Jafar_Panahi.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/13D4F1E420626B9/The_Circle_%28Dayereh%29_%282000%29_–_Jafar_Panahi.idx
http://nitroflare.com/view/C3E2A74D92C785F/The_Circle_%28Dayereh%29_%282000%29_–_Jafar_Panahi.sub
http://nitroflare.com/view/0CCA862D05B7A9C/Interview_-_Jafar_Panahi.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/5CCF3DFD9EC947D/Trailer.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/f849d742efcc4/Interview_-_Jafar_Panahi.mp4
https://publish2.me/file/70f65787b72b6/The_Circle_%28Dayereh%29_%282000%29_–_Jafar_Panahi.idx
https://publish2.me/file/00bfaccc07517/The_Circle_%28Dayereh%29_%282000%29_–_Jafar_Panahi.mp4
https://publish2.me/file/18ebb80df41f8/The_Circle_%28Dayereh%29_%282000%29_–_Jafar_Panahi.sub
https://publish2.me/file/e9e39dd231c87/Trailer.mp4

Language(s) Persian
Subtitles included: English (idx, sub)

زندگی و دیگر هیچ

A director and his son return to a region damaged by the Guilan earthquake, hoping to find the children who appeared in his film a few years earlier.

Acquarello wrote:

On a chaotic and congested highway toll interchange, an off-camera toll clerk listens impassively to a humanitarian public service radio broadcast from a Red Crescent spokesperson urging listeners to consider adoption of the many children who have been left orphaned as a result of the recent devastating earthquake in northern Iran. An unnamed, middle-aged film director (Farhad Kheradmand) stops at the tollbooth and inquires about the condition of the main road to Rudbar, having been turned back a day earlier at the intermediate town of Manjil due to the impassability of the route. Accompanied by his son Puya (Puya Pievar), the director is hoping to reach the village of Koker in search of the Ahmadpour brothers: two boys who had appeared in his film, Where is the Friend’s House? (a self-reference to Abbas Kiarostami’s earlier film). However, the director’s plans are soon derailed when a police officer explains that the road is only available for access by emergency and supply vehicles. Attempting to traverse the main road as far as he is able to (and allowed by the emergency authorities to travel on the road), he inevitably finds himself snarled in an interminable traffic juggernaut on the outskirts of Rostamabad. Spotting a convenient rural side road through the hills, he takes an impulsive detour through earthquake-ravaged communities and makeshift tent relief aid centers in search of an alternate route to the remote village and, in the process, encounters a series of aggrieved, but resilient earthquake survivors as they slowly rebuild their scarred lives after the incalculable tragedy.

The second film in the Pirandellically interwoven Earthquake Trilogy (along with Where is the Friend’s House? and Through the Olive Trees) that examines – and redefines – the relational perspective between reality and fiction, Life and Nothing More… is an understated, meditative, and celebratory portrait of perseverance, human dignity, and survival. Set amidst the recovery efforts of earthquake-torn northern Iran (note the indelible long shot of the director’s stopped car that reveals the deep crevices on the side of a hill), the film is a metaphoric journey through the process (and procession) of life and renewal: the baby in the forest; the villagers’ continued excavation of their homes (an allusive image of rising from the dust that also appears in a subsequent Kiarostami film, The Wind Will Carry Us); Puya’s innocent, yet pensive and profound rationalization on the life (and spiritually) affirming consequence of tragedy; the newly married couple (Tahereh and Hossein of Through the Olive Trees). The abstractly sublime, lyrical, and uplifting final sequence shows the once-rebuffed hitchhiker ironically aiding the director in extricating his automobile from the side of a hill after stalling during a steep ascent – a haunting and profoundly expressive image of humanity, compassion, and community that continues to exist and persevere against the natural desolation of an austerely beautiful, yet unforgiving and fractured landscape.

http://nitroflare.com/view/5945A07558912A3/Zendegi_va_digar_hich__Abbas_Kiarostami__1992.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/97ce6b474fa4a/Zendegi_va_digar_hich_%5BAbbas_Kiarostami%5D_1992.mkv

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English, French

لباسی برای عروسی

A woman orders a suit from a tailor for her young son to wear to her sister’s wedding. The tailor’s apprentice, together with two other teenage boys who work in the same building, devise a plan to try on the suit at night to see what it feels like. Things get a little complicated but in the morning, at the last possible minute, they manage to return the suit to its proper place.

Pat Padua wrote:

After his first feature, The Traveler, Abbas Kiarostami spent the next few years making shorter films for the state education agency Kanun. Among these is the five-minute “Two Solutions for One Problem” (1975), which teaches one of the more straightforward lessons in the director’s work for the agency. In this conflict between schoolboys, Dara borrows a textbook from Nader, but has unfortunately torn his friend’s book. The first solution, introduced on a blackboard as if it’s a mathematical problem, is vengeful: Nader breaks something that belongs to Dara, and the boys fight. In the second solution, the boys work together to mend the torn book. The vignette may be one of the most optimistic works in the director’s oeuvre.

The 15-minute film “The Colors” (1976) is Kiarostami’s most visually rich and experimental work of this period, with bright, highly saturated hues to teach children the names of colors. Even this benignly didactic piece has an element of subversion when the colors are shot out of a row of wine bottles. You can watch this and “Two Solutions” on YouTube, and while this vivid short doesn’t have subtitles, it doesn’t need them.

This isn’t the case with A Wedding Suit (1976), the relatively chatty mid-length film he made next. A middle-class woman takes her son to the tailor to order a suit for her daughter’s wedding. The tailor’s apprentice, Ali, is hounded by two working class boys, Hossein and Mamad, who want to borrow the suit and sneak it back into the shop before the clients pick it up.

As in many of Kiarostami’s films, Wedding is preoccupied with class, visually emphasized when the boys shout out to each other from the floors of the shopping arcade where the tailor has his shop. Even the middle-class boy whose suit is being made aspires for more: While his mother negotiates a price for the suit, the boy looks at a book of American clothing models. He turns the page to a photo of white-leisure suited men, with a woman in black with her arm draped over one of the men as she pours a drink into his glass. “He’ll need to know how to choose a wife,” the tailor tells the boy’s mother as the child ponders this colorful preview of the sophisticated adult world.

The adolescent dream of adulthood comes true early, if only for a moment, when Mamad, wearing the suit for one night, sneaks off to a magic show. This is his dream of how the rich live, and it’s as glamorous and mysterious as he imagined.

But reality comes back when Ali argues over the suit’s return. This is a repetitive scene that may go on for longer than it should in a 53-minute film. But as this scene continues, a bit of real-life magic (or skilled animal wrangling) appears in the form of a cat that walks past the arguing boys, then stops to rest in order to better observe these humans and their curious behavior.

The film ends as a thriller, Ali rushing to get the suit back from Mamad, whose father has beaten him for sneaking away, and get it to the shop before his boss knows what happened. A Wedding Suit is among Kiarostami’s more straightforward films, and a strong early work.

Quote:
In Lebasi bara-ye Arusi (“Suit for a Wedding” 1976), Kiarostami begins to succumb to the temptation to compare the world of children to that of adults, a comparison potentially very damaging to his cinema, due precisely to the same trap of moral sentimentality into which he fell in Two Solutions for One Problem.What usually saves Kiarostami’s cinema whenever he lapses into sentimentalism is his cultivated intuition to let his camera be guided by the jagged logic of the child’s world. In Suit for a Wedding, a young boy is taken to a tailor by his mother to have a new suit made for his sister’s wedding. While the tailor and the mother negotiate the terms of their transaction, the young apprentice of the master tailor and the boy have their own little business to attend to: how to get the boyt o try on the suit the night before it is due without getting the young apprentice fired.Whatever the technical errors of Suit for a Wedding, it marks a transition in Kiarostami’s view of the world of adults. For Kiarostami adults are finished realities, children realities in the making.

Dabashi, Hamid. Close up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future. London ; New York: Verso, 2001.

http://nitroflare.com/view/60FBA335EE082BB/Wedding_Suit__Abbas_Kiarostami__1976.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/03c7c355d619e/Wedding_Suit_%5BAbbas_Kiarostami%5D_1976.mkv

Language(s):Persian, Azerbaijani
Subtitles:English, French

دو راه حل برای يک مسئله‎

Two young boys are classmates. When Nader returns his friend’s notebook, the cover of which he has inadvertently torn, the other is faced with two solutions: either he takes revenge or the two boys look for a solution together, glue for example, and thus remain good friends.

Quote:

Kiarostami has not always been successful in keeping clear of the potential pitfalls that threaten his carefully balanced distance between reality and its undoing. In Do Rab-e Hal bara-ye yek Mas’aleb (“Two Solutions for One Problem,”1975), one of his weakest short films, we see him falling victim to one of the most dangerous threats to his cinema: moral sentimentalism. By and large, Kiarostami has controlled this threat and kept it at bay with remarkable ingenuity—perhaps intuitive, perhaps cultivated, one can never tell, and that is a powerful aspect of his cinema. But in Two Solutions for One Problem we see what a slippery road Kiarostami has traveled. Two classmates face the dilemma of one of them having inadvertently torn the other’s notebook. With the first solution, the “victim”would have his revenge but he prefers the second, his cooperation with the “perpetrator,” which resolves the problem and preserves their friendship. Oddly enough, in retrospect, one develops a greater admiration for Kiarostami’s cinema when one notices such occasional setbacks. For it is in films like Two Solutions for One Problem that one sees the relentless pursuit of a cinematic language in which Kiarostami emerges triumphant. Despite its structural failure and its aesthetic collapse into moral sentimentalism, Two Solutions for One Problem still bears the marks of the same type of experimentation in uncharted realms of sensibilities.What Kiarostami questions in this film—the nature of revenge as a human trait, one of the most enduring features of human hostility—he approaches through the perspective of children. Kiarostami has always sought to experiment with alternative modes of progression from identical moments of crisis. In a sense he is trying to recapture moments in cultural infancy in which tension and aggression have resulted in a particular course of action, while other modes of response have been left perilously unattended.

Dabashi, Hamid. Close up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future. London ; New York: Verso, 2001.

http://nitroflare.com/view/4400FBF01FFC42A/Two_Solutions_for_One_Problem__Abbas_Kiarostami__1975.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/4deb775ccd93c/Two_Solutions_for_One_Problem_%5BAbbas_Kiarostami%5D_1975.mkv

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English, French

تجربه

A fourteen-year-old boy is employed as general assistant in a photographer’s studio, where he is also allowed to sleep. From afar, he is in love with a girl who lives in a wealthy district. One morning, he comes to offer his services at the girl’s parents’ house. There seems to be a ray of hope. But that evening the answer is negative, and final… A sort of adolescent double of the young boy in Zang-e Tafrih , the young Mamad of Tadjrebeh has a different obsession: rather than his football, he is attached here to the face of a girl, the painful result of love at first sight. Rootless and homeless, Mamad is a body borne on the flux of the town, his nameless and aimless anguish soothed by a ride round the courtyard on his elder brother’s moped or the half-bare waist of a woman followed in the crowd… Counters, doors and windows punctuate this film of absence, as well as images: the photographs which the apprentice files and stamps, mirrors of elsewhere, of another possible world.

http://nitroflare.com/view/F1F06F27315952E/Experience__Abbas_Kiarostami__1973.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/0e52b425aea41/Experience_%5BAbbas_Kiarostami%5D_1973.mkv

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English, French

Synopsis:
Makhmalbaf puts an advertisement in the papers calling for an open casting for his next movie. However when hundreds of people show up, he decides to make a movie about the casting and the screen tests of the would-be actors.

Review:
A seminal film for Makhmalbaf (it laid the foundations for Moment of Innocence) and a key film for Iran’s new cinema. In 1994, to celebrate the medium’s upcoming centenary, Makhmalbaf placed an ad for aspiring movie actors in a newspaper. Five thousand people of all ages showed up (this opens with scenes of the riot) and the resulting film is a highly selective compilation of episodes from the screen tests. It packs a lot into 70 minutes. It’s a spot-sample of Iranian society in 1994, noting the rise of assertive young women. There’s a wry perspective on Khomeini’s revolution (note the man who trades on his prison friendship with Makhmalbaf to ask favours for his sons). There are reflections on cinephilia, from the idiots who think they look like Hollywood stars or want to show off their macho gunplay to the would-be actor who pretends to be blind and claims to be able to ‘feel’ the films he sits through. And there’s Makhmalbaf deconstructing the film-making process: acting the directorial bully, then watching others (women!) emulate his bullying.

— TimeOut.

http://nitroflare.com/view/A254D8D35263902/Salaam_Cinema_%281995%29_–_Mohsen_Makhmalbaf.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/ab19faab3325a/Salaam_Cinema_%281995%29_–_Mohsen_Makhmalbaf.mkv

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English (muxed)

Quote:
Nasrin wants to divorce her husband, but knows she won’t be able to get custody of her six-year-old daughter if she does. So, unbeknown to her husband, she and her daughter move to another part of town where Nasrin finds a job at a hospital crèche. One day her husband catches up with her and their lives take an unexpected turn.

http://nitroflare.com/view/9C45A0A4E9731CC/Searing.Summer.2017.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/2efd64c40ca19/Searing.Summer.2017.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mp4

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English

from imdb review:
This is an unusual film of exceptional values–75 minutes long in color, with hardly any spoken dialogs. I saw this Iranian film in Farsi without English subtitles at the Early Iranian cinema retrospective on-going International Film Festival of Kerala, India. That I was watching a print without subtitles did not make a difference as there were very few lines of spoken dialogs.

This is a very accessible film for any audience to enjoy–its story and values are not merely Iranian, it’s universal.

The film is set in rural Iran that had not tasted petro-dollar prosperity. The setting is on fringes of desert land, where water is scarce, rainfall scanty and hardly any blade of grass is green. Add to it wind and dust that buffets and whips man and animal and you can imagine plight of the people who live on the fringes of society.

The film is moving tale of a young teenager returning to his village with a goat–only to find his family and villagers have moved on to escape natures vagaries and that one old man remains. He gives the goat to him and goes in search of his family. Water is scarce and well water it treated with reverence and never wasted.

http://nitroflare.com/view/2106ED90D3E71A2/Water%2C_Wind%2C_Dust_%28Amir_Naderi%2C_1989%29.mpg
http://nitroflare.com/view/F4D0CFC5A0E0B4E/Water%2C_Wind%2C_Dust_%28Amir_Naderi%2C_1989%29.srt

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:Italian,English

Quote:
A look at the lives of 3 well-off Iranian couples who are ostensibly living an idyllic life and are going to have a get-together for a birthday party. Each couple bearing their own sordid secrets attend the party to find out what follows on the hills of the cold welcome of their host.

http://nitroflare.com/view/4B39FF08221A7CC/Felicity.Land.2011.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/A3A5F2B5F1C11B0/Felicity_Land.srt

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English(We didn’t check the timing)

Quote:
Hailed as one of the masterpieces of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, Bashu, the Little Stranger opens during an Iraqi air-raid on a small Iranian village bordering the war-front in Khuzestan. When 10-year old Bashu’s loses his home and his entire family in the raid he takes refuge in a truck that unexpectedly drives north, close to the Russian border. There he is assumed to be ‘wild’ because of his incomprehensible dialect and dark skin; only Nai, a mother of two whose husband is away for work, takes pity on him. Soon she and Bashu weave a relationship strong enough that Bashu’s traumatic experience with the war makes way for hope and trust.

http://nitroflare.com/view/9CD7A6B28473127/BashutheLittleStranger.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/446DC8D806F8A87/BashutheLittleStranger.part2.rar

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English

Plot
Iranian director Ali Reza Amini’s Namehay Bad (Letters in the Wind) is set in the familiar world of basic training. A group of uneducated cadets is abused, toughened up, and shaped by military men. Many of the young men have to make difficult adjustments to this new life. When one of the men gets the opportunity to visit Teheran, the others give him messages that they want him to deliver to their families. Letters in the Wind was screened at the Toronto Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Controversy (Wikipedia)
The original 35 mm color version of the film was banned by the Government of Iran when the movie released in 2002. The movie was released in a gray tone digital version in the 2002 Toronto Film Festival. The director based some parts of the movie on his own experiences in the Iran-Iraq war, referring to the movie as being made in the “belly of the army”.

Reviews:
Director Ali-Reza Amini makes an affecting directorial debut with this touching, humorous neorealist film from Iran. Recalling his own days as a soldier in Iran’s army, Amini shows a barracks of mostly illiterate young men, enduring their required service in the military, confined in a snowbound camp near Tehran. Their only contact with the outside world is through a small tape recorder, smuggled in by one of the men. (TCM)

Comparable to Full Metal Jacket, the film follows a young man as he does his military service at a camp near Teheran. He has smuggled a tiny tape recorder into the barracks and listens to the voice of a woman, sometimes allowing his buddies to listen. The tape recorder is their lifeline to a more cheerful world outside the misery of their military service. LETTERS IN THE WIND, despite being offically unable to leave Iran’s borders, has become internationally acclaimed. (Amazon)

http://nitroflare.com/view/C8ECA8BA0FA5363/Letters_in_the_Wind.avi

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English (Hardsubbed)

Quote:
One of my most anticipated films at last year’s Toronto Film Festival was Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly. Ghobadi had directed A Time for Drunken Horses, a devastating film about Kurdish children on the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq border. I knew that Turtles Can Fly was going to shift the focus over to the Iraqi side just before the U.S. invasion, and I was more than curious to see how he’d handle the political angle.

The politics erupted in Ghobadi’s post-film discussion. Ghobadi, who is Kurdish himself, was assisted by a translator. However, many people in the audience grew increasingly upset with her. She didn’t seem to realize that Ghobadi was using the words ‘Kurds’ and ‘Kurdish,’ and so she translated them simply as ‘Iraqis’ and ‘Iraqi.’ The Kurds in the audience were deeply offended by the perceived slight. The film festival, designed to cross cultural barriers, had only served to highlight the striking differences in that part of the world.

Ghobadi is exceedingly familiar with those differences. His first two films focus on Kurds caught in a physical and social no-man’s land. Ghobadi’s characters–two children in Drunken Horses and a father and two grown brothers in Marooned in Iraq–attempt to get across a national border so they can reunite with their larger family. Their difficulty in doing so mirrors the Kurds’ larger situation. Marginalized in Iran and brutally subjugated in Saddam’s Iraq, they have struggled to maintain a cohesive society. Those themes are altered somewhat in Turtles Can Fly. The film takes place in early 2003, and the Kurds await the American invasion, believing that, through this, they will finally gain some measure of autonomy. But Ghobadi is no idealist. He knows the costs of war, and his film presents those with startling brutality.

The main character is a thirteen-year-old boy nicknamed Satellite (an energetically appealing performance from Soran Ebrahim) who has made himself indispensable in his Kurdish village by being a wiz with electronics. He also has great trading contacts, to the point where he gets a satellite dish for a village anxious to hear about America’s war plans. Into the village come a girl named Agrin, her arm-less brother, and a young toddler who’s going blind. Their physical handicaps are barely noticeable in this area filled with land mines and the people who’ve been maimed by them. In fact, Satellite marshals dozens of children to clear farmland of mines, and then uses money to feed the numerous refugees.

Satellite’s self-sufficient capitalist ways contrast starkly with the village elders who do nothing but sit around the television waiting for news of the invasion. Agrin (played with quiet intensity by Avaz Latif) offers the other side of self-reliance, ignoring Satellite’s offers of help and believing that accepting any assistance will only lead to disaster. Certainly, Kurdish history supports Agrin’s position, though her fatalism is hard to swallow.

Ghobadi got his start in movies by working with Abbas Kiarostami and the Makhmalbafs, two pillars of the Iranian New Wave. He’s learned their lessons well, and his neo-realist approach grounds the film in the struggles of the poor and powerless. The Eberts of the world might call it miserablist; I call it a healthy antidote to our 24-hour obsession with the rich and famous. Ghobadi, like Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, also has a way with finding a metaphorical image that’s both gorgeous and thought-provoking. One amazing slow-motion shot in Turtles involves a helicopter flying low over a village. Has it come to bomb? to provide assistance? to deliver troops? Or is it just passing over a village it didn’t realize was on the map?

While Ghobadi’s tale is a sad one, he leavens it with humor and spot-on observations of how children interact. The non-professional cast, another hallmark of Iranian cinema, is strong, even in the final act when events grow more intense. Ghobadi, who also wrote the film, has an agenda, one that he laid out in the post-film Q&A. He remarked that everything we’ve seen about Iraq on tv is propaganda. It makes Bush and Saddam out to be the superstars, while regular people are “extras.” Turtles Can Fly is designed to reverse that, making regular people the stars and reducing the dictators (the plural is his) to extras. In that, he largely succeeds. I wish the ending had been a little more restrained, which would have given it an even greater power. There’s so much catastrophe or near-catastrophe we become almost numb. Nonetheless, this is a powerful work, filled with incredibly striking compositions and honest acting and emotions.

http://nitroflare.com/view/0167DA8806B1DD3/Bahman_Ghobadi_-_%282004%29_Turtles_Can_Fly.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/D6B938D77807462/Turtles.can.fly.v2.srt

Language(s):Kurdish
Subtitles:English

The Salesman tells the story of a young couple Emad and Rana who play the lead roles in a local rendition of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Meanwhile, their personal relationship takes a hit after moving into a house that was previously inhabited by a woman who allegedly pursued a career in prostitution.

http://nitroflare.com/view/FEA0BF49CEF5050/Salesman_2016.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/FBAB654F020F981/Salesman_2016.eng.srt

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English

Reza Motori, who has feigned madness, escapes from an asylum and robs a factory, with the aid of a friend. Afterwards, a young writer, who looks exactly like Reza, visits the asylum in order to write about inmates. There he is mistaken for Reza and detained. Meanwhile, Reza assumes the identity of the writer. Reza falls in love with the writer’s fiancée and decides to give up the money he has stolen from the factory, but his friends prevent him from doing so. Received the best actor and best music prizes at the Third Iranian National Film Festival “Sepas” in 1971.

http://nitroflare.com/view/FE1F10845E556BA/Reza_the_Motorcyclist.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/2B4B5FECF8285FC/Reza_the_Motorcyclist-03.srt

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English

A young teenager returns home after an absence to find his village in Iran deserted because of an incredibly severe drought. He begins a search to find his family, traveling through an amazingly bleak and desolate landscape. Primarily an essay on the issue of humans vs. nature, the film is of interest for technical and cultural reasons.

http://nitroflare.com/view/7DB905B48DC98EE/Water_Wind_Dust_-_Aab_Baad_Khak.mkv

Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English hardsubbed

Synopsis:
Two boys compete for one job they both desperately need.

Awards:
Won – 1992 – Crystal Simorgh Award – Best Film – Fajr Film Festival
Featured in Film Magazine’s Best Iranian film lists of 2009 and 2008

http://nitroflare.com/view/9B015EEA6496C3C/Niaz_%281992%29-KG.avi

Language:Farsi
Subtitles:Hardcoded English

When we think of Iraq, we picture a war torn country which had seen the worst of a dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, where it spent many years in conflict with Iran, before the UN moved in during Desert Storm to liberate occupied Kuwait, followed by the US led invasion in Desert Storm II. Western media continue to pepper us with news that internal strife continues to this very day with news of suicide and miscellaneous bombings, and I’m sure we’re more than curious to want to know about tales from within, rather than agencies from the outside that continue to paint it like a war zone. This is as close as you can go on a road trip from Northern Iraq to Baghdad, onward to Nasiriyah then Babylon.

Son of Babylon deals with the missing generation, and a mother/grandson’s search for their son/father, who was taken by force years ago during the Gulf War, and hasn’t been heard since. Set three weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the film opens with the young boy Ahmed (brilliantly portrayed by a flute holding Yasser Taleeb) and his grandmother Um-Ibrahim (Shehzad Hussein) beginning their long quest for answers and closure, and it is through their eyes and witnessing their experiences, do we get a glimpse of just how emotionally daunting and physically challenging this quest is, amidst a stunning on location backdrop of an Iraq we never get to see, until now.

Written, directed and lensed by Mohamed Al-Daradji, his story touches on the experiences of three generations of Iraqis, as Ahmed and Um-Ibrahim come into contact with Musa (Bashir al-Majid), an ex-Republican Guard about the same age as what their son/father would be if found, and how his life got filled by the war time atrocities that he had to commit under orders. The narrative puts our trio on a never-ending search as they get bounced and referred to another city where other mass graves have been found, suggesting an inexplicable nationwide genocide that had taken place which accounted for the thousands of people who have disappeared.

The story will also open eyes to how diverse Iraq is, with language and cultural barriers from within the population as they struggle to communicate with one another (usually dismissed fairly quickly when one speaks a different language), only to share common ground in their history of grief brought about through the ravages of war. It’s not all doom and gloom all the time as the film does contain some light hearted moments courtesy of Ahmed, and his significance cannot be ignored in a film that closes with a bittersweet end to suffering, and the hope placed on today’s youth who have to forge their own way ahead on a long, dusty road of uncertainty. Ahmed demonstrates his street-smartness, haggling abilities and knowledge of his rights, that I think he epitomizes the spirit of the new generation who are competent in holding their own ground.

Travelling the world’s various festivals, picking up a multitude of awards and being Iraq’s official entry to the Academy Awards next year, this is not an easy film to sit through as it does get a little bit exasperating with the outward show of gloom that will sap your emotional energies, but to the patient viewer it rewards with its beautiful sweeping visuals of a land that most have not had a chance to see, and a poignant story on forgiveness, reconciliation and internal healing that must begin for a nation emerging from its ruins. Recommended! (A NUTSHELL REVIEW)

http://nitroflare.com/view/755D7D82A2159BD/son.of.babylon.2009.subbed.dvdrip.xvid.avi

Language:Arabic, Kurdish
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

Review (DVDVerdict.com)

The irony at the center of Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf’s (The Apple) movie, Blackboards, is that basic education may have the power to radically improve the lives of the poor and nomadic Kurdish peoples of Iran and Iraq, but it’s dreadfully ineffective at addressing their immediate struggles to survive.

The picture opens with a gaggle of teachers making their way on foot through a dusty mountain pass in Iran, blackboards strapped to their backs, in search of students. Two of the teachers, Said (Said Mohamadi, Delbaran) and Reeboir (Bahman Ghobadi, writer-director of Marooned in Iraq), break away from the pack and then from each other. Said eventually falls in with a group of Kurdish refugees trying to make their way across the border into Iraq to return to their home town of Halebtcheh, which had previously suffered a chemical weapon attack at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Reeboir, meanwhile, runs into a group of young boys who work as “mules” in the criminal underground, running stolen goods back and forth between the Iran-Iraq border. Each man forms a bond with his new companions, though none of the struggling poor find their teaching skills particularly useful.

With its cinéma vérité style and mostly non-professional actors (obvious nods to both the French New Wave and Italian neorealism), its exotically desolate locales, and its wunderkind director (a woman from the Islamic world, no less), Blackboards is exactly the sort of movie film festivals fall all over each other to celebrate. And celebrate it they did. Blackboards won a Grand Jury Prize at AFI, and a Jury Prize at Cannes, where it was also nominated for the Palm D’Or. Did it earn these honors? Sure. It’s an impressively evocative, narratively precise, and visually sure-footed piece of work from a director who is only 20 years old. The Apple, Samira Makhmalbaf’s first feature, made when she was only 18, was also received with much international acclaim. And it’s fairly clear that, while Makhmalbaf is an incredibly talented filmmaker, the maturity and aesthetic control on display in her first films are at least partially a result of her close collaboration with her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar), who produced, co-wrote, and edited Blackboards. In fact, the thematic similarities between the films of father and daughter have led some to speculate that Samira may be a proxy for Mohsen, a tool through which the filmmaker can demonstrate the gender iniquities in his own culture. That’s taking things too far, I think. Footage in the documentary included on the disc shows Samira’s delicate hands-on direction of her non-professionals, and how diligently she works to draw out the performances she’s looking for. I’m guessing Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s influence is most evident in the film’s restraint, its quiet naturalism, and its willingness to allow political subtext to remain subtext (these are things he certainly could have influenced in both the writing and editing phases of the film’s production). As Samira Makhmalbaf matures into an independent voice, I have no doubt her willingness to collaborate with her father in these early films will pay off in a big way.

As noted, Blackboards is a delicate piece of filmmaking, deceptively simple in structure. That delicacy begins with the script, written by both Makhmalbafs. With the exception of a clumsily expository passage in which one of the boys confesses to Reeboir his job as a transporter of contraband, the piece is free-flowing and confident in its audience’s intelligence. Like any solid piece of realism, the story feels relatively unstructured, though the brief 85-minute running time ensures it maintains its thematic focus.

One of the most effective motifs in the film is Reeboir’s and Said’s question to various individuals among the children and refugees: “Do you know how to read?” The answer is always, “No.” To the follow-up question, “Do you want to learn?” the answer is also always, “No.” In fact, Said never succeeds in provoking even the slightest interest in learning among any of the refugees. As far as they’re concerned, his blackboard is far more useful in shielding them from the eyes of enemy soldiers than it is as a tool of literacy. Reeboir does manage to interest one of the boys in learning, but the inability of his efforts to produce any improvement in the boy’s circumstances only hammers home the film’s tragic fatalism.

Both Mohamadi and Ghobadi turn in fine lead performances, tempering their characters’ desperation with just enough humor that the film never feels morose. Ghobadi’s Reeboir is nobly earnest and dedicated in his attempts to change the boys’ lives for the better, while Mohamadi’s Said might be dismissed as an ignorant buffoon (abandoned by his wife, he believes his infant son is beginning to take on the physical characteristics of his various wet nurses) if he weren’t so desperate to do right by the refugees who basically save him from starvation. The non-professionals who round out the cast are as stiff in their delivery of dialogue as one would expect, but their authenticity more than compensates.

Ebrahim Ghafori’s (Kandahar) cinematography is suitably straightforward, its most obvious conceit an abundance of jittery handheld shots. For the most part, Ghafori allows the ruggedly beautiful, sometimes haunting landscapes to speak for themselves, and the result is a documentary look that avoids imposing rigid compositional formality on settings that don’t need it.

http://nitroflare.com/view/93B682AB88A4B72/Samira_Makhmalbaf.Takhte_siah.2000.Blackboards.DVDRip.XviD.avi

Eng srt:
www.moviesubtitles.net/download-file.php?id=161651&hash=103c6a34db860fcd0fb4da3b8c808f91
spanish srt:
http://www.opensubtitles.org/es/subtitles/3102148/takhte-siah-es

Language:Kurdish