“Our life is a movie! You shouldn’t be making another one,” an angry mother shouts, but her daughter is out the gate, determined to join a group of clandestine actors and filmmakers in a waiting van. In the dusty village of Khosro, twenty kilometers from Tehran, work can be found at the brick kiln, but amateur film production gives the locals something to live for. Or did, until the authorities discovered this community pastime, and writer-director Ali Matini was imprisoned. Now all but a few shun the project on pain of arrest. But Matini and company dared to make one more film so that the better-known director Moslem Mansouri (once a political prisoner himself) could document their art and courage. With a donkey for a dolly, the crew quips, “Even Orson Welles cannot work like this.” But then, Welles can’t honestly say, as Matini does, “Our life is what Kafka described. . . . We are hanging from the gallows of cinema.”

24 April 2003

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