The Day I Became a Woman

Dir.: Marzieh Meshkini

NR, 78 min.

Opening Friday at the Belcourt Theatre

Watching The Day I Became a Woman, one gets the feeling that there’s something deeper going on behind all those Iranian films about children. We know that filmmakers working under Iran’s Muslim government use children to avoid the restrictions placed on adult men and women working together, and we know that the sensitive depiction of childhood in Iranian cinema has helped it gain an appreciative worldwide audience. But this collection of three stories about women in crisis reveals what childhood signifies to writer Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his wife, director Marzieh Meshkini—freedom from the restrictions that accompany every aspect of gender relations in the adult world.

Children figure prominently in the first and last stories of the trilogy. In the first segment, a girl snatches desperately at her last hour of freedom on her 9th birthday. Come noon, she will put on the chador, the head-to-toe covering of Muslim women in the strictest societies, and live in isolation from her male playmates; until then, she begs her friend Hassan to come out and play. Segment number two concerns a woman accosted by her husband, family members, and tribe while engaged in sinful behavior: riding a bicycle in a race. The last story follows an old woman around a shopping mall as she buys all the furniture, appliances, and trinkets she’d never been able to indulge in before. Young boys tote her purchases and play with them on the beach when she leaves them behind.

The style is a far cry from the slice-of-life realism we’ve come to expect from notable Iranian exports like Close-Up, which are rooted in the documentary tradition. It’s stripped down, almost completely devoid of detail. The seashore, where all three segments spend significant screen time, is the model for the storytelling: just beach, rocks, and water—an empty stage for a metaphorical tale. The theme of freedom is unavoidable in the first story, in which the little girl stands outside a house while her male friend clutches the window bars, trapped inside doing homework. It’s as much the men who are imprisoned by the laws of haram, sexual purity, as the women.

In the second tale, the woman on the bicycle alternately passes her fellow racers and is passed by them, isolated by her defiance of men’s dictates even while the chador links her to all women in anonymous, identical womanhood. And in the third, the freedom of a widow, past her sexual years and finally able to enjoy the sensual pleasures of consumerism, is surpassed by the freedom of the half-naked boys who play in the open-air female domain constructed by her purchases.

To Western eyes, the critique of gender relations in Iran—far from the worst offender in this area among the Muslim states—is stark and impossible to miss. But because the film presents simple consequences, it has not been condemned by Iranian authorities, unlike Jafar Panahi’s more conventional narrative The Circle. Perhaps a canvas that is simple to the point of abstraction can be read clearly, literally, and unmistakably in two different ways, by two different cultures. All that we can know, from this side of the cultural divide, is that the beauty and desolation of the rocky seashore is what Meshkini and Makhmalbaf tell us we would see if we could strip Iranian womanhood bare.

—Donna Bowman

Festival occasion

Since its turnaround three years ago, the Nashville Independent Film Festival has posted double-digit percentage increases in attendance each year—but without a commensurate increase in the quality of films. Not anymore. The most striking thing about the 32nd annual NIFF, which concluded last Sunday at Regal’s Green Hills Commons 16, wasn’t just the marked improvement of the selections. It was that everyone not only noticed but welcomed the improvement—a sign that Nashville moviegoers are sharper, savvier, and more adventurous about movies than the chains might have you believe.

Take experimental films. Last year’s experimental program, in a dud morning slot, was notoriously weak. This year, the program was moved to a Saturday-night slot, and the lineup included some genuinely challenging, form-expanding work. The result? An audience of nearly 100 people, who responded with excitement to some of the NIFF’s most difficult viewing—including the mind-blowing found-footage assault “Outer Space,” for me the festival’s hands-down highlight. Even the boos that greeted one film showed people were paying attention.

It helped that the NIFF’s new executive director, Brian Gordon, and managing director Kelly Brownlee paid attention to the suggestions and complaints made after last year’s festival. Sure, there were minor glitches, but in most areas, the festival was a big step forward, starting with the programming. After last year’s backbreaking 275 films, which left no room for additional screenings, Gordon slashed the number of selections and booked multiple showings. The big winner was Memphis director Craig Brewer, whose striking chop-shop drama The Poor & Hungry won the festival’s three top prizes, including an Oscar-qualifying run at a Regal megaplex in L.A. The attendance boost of a second showing likely allowed Brewer to clinch the NIFF’s audience award over heavily favored items such as Billy Bob Thornton’s better-than-its-buzz Daddy and Them.

More importantly, the selectivity resulted in better movies. At South by Southwest this year, I saw maybe six films of truly standout quality. This year’s NIFF matched that easily. Documentaries were especially strong: It says something that this year’s Sundance winner, Kate Davis’ moving Southern Comfort, lost the NIFF prize to Monteith McCollum’s radically strange and beautiful black-and-white doc Hybrid. As for features, the competition items typically ranged from fair to grim. But Jim McKay’s Our Song, a portrait of teenage Latina and African American girlfriends in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, was a vibrant addition to the naturalism and social concern of truly independent American cinema—also represented by a retrospective screening of Charles Burnett’s landmark 1977 film Killer of Sheep.

Full disclosure: I asked the festival to show the Burnett film, as part of a sidebar on classic independent films. The sidebar is a great idea: Not only does it give viewers a chance to see rare movies on the big screen, it adds luster to the festival as a whole. The movie that convinced me of the idea’s potential was Alan Rudolph’s 1978 rarity Remember My Name, chosen by the Tennessean’s Kevin Nance. It was the kind of movie-nut discovery that makes the festival experience exciting; I’d love to see the NIFF program a week of classic independents between festivals, since the audience is clearly there.

Or is it? Although attendance figures weren’t in at press time, numbers were up 25 percent the first few days, and the NIFF seemed certain to surpass last year’s attendance of 10,000. So where are these folks when the Belcourt shows George Washington, or Regal shows Bread and Roses? The fun of festival-going leads people to take chances on films they wouldn’t see otherwise. I’d love to see a tenth of the NIFF’s audience take a chance on these and other little-publicized films year round. Consider it a warm-up for next year’s fest.

—Jim Ridley