There’s a special thrill when the first film you see at a festival is a great one. When The Seed of the Sacred Fig ended, I didn’t need to see anything else. The film is so rich and complex, with such moral clarity, it’ll take weeks to absorb it.
Until a few months ago director Mohammad Rosoulof lived in Iran, but after years in prison for making films that challenged the government, and learning that he was about to be sent back for another six years, he fled.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about a family. Iman, the father, is a government investigator, and the first sign of trouble comes when he’s promoted – because he’s asked to approve a sheaf of death warrants, even though he’s not allowed to read them. He objects to a superior and to his wife, but then without any fuss, he falls in line.
Iman caves just as the protests over the death of the teenaged girl Armita Garavand begin to heat up. The morality police had arrested her for not wearing a headscarf. Iman helps round up lots of young women – many will die – and now Iman’s two daughters grow rebellious. As they resist him, he grows repressive with them.
Footage of actual government street violence plays against Iman’s tyranny at home. Subtle shifts in loyalty show in the daughters and the mother. What’s clear is that men in power in Iran hate and fear women, and when women show their power, the men – in public and in private – become unhinged. It’s hard to call The Seed of the Sacred Fig beautiful, but in its elegant movements and insights, it is in fact beautiful. And Mohammad Rosoulof is a brave man.
Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia came to Telluride with All We Imagine as Light, a picture about three Hindu women in Mumbai. They’re not poor, and this is not a film about poverty. The oldest of the women is about to be evicted by a greedy landlord; the youngest has a Muslim boyfriend – a dangerous thing in Hindu nationalist India – and the third is a nurse with a long absent husband. Mumbai is a riot of color and jam-packed with human beings. But what comes through most of all is a stunning sense of intimacy, often through tender, extraordinary shots of hands as characters touch each other with love and care. In its way, All We Imagine as Light is a movie about hands, and the ways people use their hands.
Nickel Boys comes from the Colson Whitehead novel about the actual Dozier Reform School in Florida for Black kids. For more than a hundred years, young boys were abused; many died and were buried in unmarked graves. The movie is about a connection over thirty years between two boys very different in character. Filmmaker RaMell Ross is a nervy visual artist who’s made a roiling, poetic and breathtaking picture of life for Black Americans.
And Telluride showed a breezy1927 silent film from Britain, Hindle Wakes by Maurice Elvey. For an hour, it looks like mush – workers on holiday from a cotton mill that looks like the only factory in English history where workers are well-treated. Then suddenly Hindle Wakes turns feminist and you wonder what the devil is going on. But it’s fun.
And there were many other good films to see – this was one of the best Telluride Film Festivals, which is saying plenty.
