Berlinale (Forum)

"Starts as a top-notch black comedy, and segues into something darker still and very serious, without ever missing a beat." – FilmInk

Synopsis

A man with his arm in a cast who thus resembles Napoleon and a well-dressed woman are making their way through a war-torn mountainous region in an SUV.

The boot of the car contains plastic bags filled with money to distribute to the needy people they encounter on their journey.

But are the two of them really on a charitable mission or are we watching a duplicitous game of temptation and morality?



Cast: Taraneh Alidoosti, Mani Haghighi, Saeed Changizian, Esmaeel Khalaj, Saber Abbar, Naqi Seif-Jamali, Nader Fallah, Mohammadreza Najafi, Ghorban Nadjafi

Mani Haghighi’s previous film Men at Work (Forum 2006) already took the standard social criticism to be found in Iranian cinema into the realm of the absurd.



Paziraie sadeh is a film both farcical and full of anger that continues in this Beckettian vein. Its desolate location seems to have come from another world, peopled by characters that appear either uprooted or merely passing through.

The apparent benefactors always attach sadistic conditions to their handouts, making one poor man swear on the Koran that he won’t share the money with his equally poor relatives and preventing another from burying his baby’s corpse.

But even as they humiliate their victims and play their funny games, reality turns out to be a highly adept opponent, more than capable of stifling their sardonic laughter. --Berlinale



Filmmaker Mani Haghighi (Men At Work, MIFF 07) fills the multiple roles of producer, writer, director and actor in this absurdist provocation about a rich couple distributing plastic bags of money in the Iranian provinces.

Haghighi plays Kaveh, handsome and possibly a touch mad. Taraneh Alidoosti, who also appeared with Haghighi in the revered About Elly (MIFF 09), is his partner in a seemingly duplicitous game of humiliation disguised as an act of charity. Moving cleverly from the comedic to the chilling, the film teases both the audience and its ‘victims’ from start to finish in a mission that gets increasingly bizarre and shocking.

Winner of the NETPAC prize at this year’s Berlinale.

“This original, sophisticated film reminds us once again of the continued vitality of the Iranian film industry.” – Screen Daily