Hot Docs 2008: Breaking Free of the Rule Book in TEHRAN

Festival coverage sponsored by IndiePix.

Every once in a while, a film arrives that calls upon its audience to question everything that it believes about film.  TEHRAN HAS NO MORE POMEGRANATES is just such a film.  Director Massoud Bakhshi has built a daring essay doc out of scratchy black and white historical films, beautiful film images from present-day Tehran and a series of narrations that defy logic and good sense.  It's madness, this picture, deconstructing every notion of film, propaganda and history.

Even more thrilling than what Bakhshi does to his audience are the creative choices he employs.  The film's central conceit is that Bakhshi has been at work for years on a government-endorsed film about the bounty of Tehran, but has hit a wall and must explain to his overseers in the culture ministry why his film will never be completed. 

What follows are a series of fragments that alternate possible truths with hilarious fictions.   Taken at face value, Bakhshi is investigating Tehran's history to attempt a better understanding of the present.  From pollution to a crumbling infrastructure (sure to destroy the city in some soon-to-occur earthquake, our narrator theorizes), Bakhshi, or at least the character of "Bakhshi", since one can truly be sure of nothing the film advances, seems to look around Tehran and find himself, unlike most of the people on the street, "dissatisfied".  Some in the audience might feel the same way after seeing this breakthrough film (I sensed a bit of confusion amongst some of my fellow Hot Docs viewers), but there's a treasure waiting for those who believe that nonfiction can come in many guises.

Bakhshi combines his satirical narration with images that may be equally fake (or at least re-purposed).  Earlier this year, Anna Broinkowski's FORBIDDEN LIES flaunted conventional rules to school her audience on the art of the con.  Similarly, Bakhshi uses the "failed film" that forms the heart of TEHRAN HAS NO MORE POMEGRANATES, to happily deceives his viewers, and it doing soon questions the truthfulness of filmmaking and history.  It's a fast moving, hilarious and cleverly-crafted piece of work.

I was also impressed by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber's finely-crafted FULL BATTLE RATTLE, which debuted at Berlin and has gone on to play at SXSW and Full Frame.

Deep in California's Mojave Desert, the US military has constructed a massive simulation environment for soldiers about to deploy to Iraq.  They have built an entire war game theater, recreating Iraqi villages and scripting situations for battalions that are about to encounter the real thing.  The details are precise - there are former Iraqis who role-play as villagers.  There are former US soldiers who seem to delight in getting to play "the bad guy" (i.e. insurgents).  There are surprise attacks, realistic-looking battle wounds, even funerals for the "fallen".

In this environment, Gerber and Moss focus on both the role-players as well as the soldiers and in doing so capture some perspectives on the conflict that we've not previously seen - the young woman with family in Iraq who wonders if helping the military do its job better is a betrayal of her country, the battalion leader who talks up his love of John Wayne and then seems hopelessly lost in the midst of an all-too-real-seeming exercise as fake bombs and bullets go off all around him, and the simulation creators who seem much more aware of how things can go wrong so quickly than most of this country's politicians and pundits.

Plenty of docs have demonstrated the futility of America's Iraq policy, and if FULL BATTLE RATTLE plays to this line of thinking (which it does only slightly), it's without having to indict any of the participants. 

FULL BATTLE RATTLE is opening this summer at the Film Forum in NYC.  It's an entertaining, sometimes funny, sometimes tense film, with top-notch cinematography and editing and graphic design that never trumps the central action.  As a number of us said after seeing it in Toronto, it's really fine filmmaking.  If that's not enough to get America over it's "Iraq movie fatigue" (God, yes, that again), then I don't know what is. 

Comments

[Whitney Borup]

I am always so encouraged by what I see coming out of Iran, especially when it comes to docs. Reading this post I'm reminded of other Iranian films that have bent and blurred the lines between documentary and fiction, namely Close Up and 10 by Kiarostami. Anyway, thank you for the review. I look forward to seeing this film.