Word: gabbeh
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wave of the mid-'60s has a country made such a lovely noise at the big festivals and in Western capitals where the term foreign film doesn't evoke a yawn. Directors Abbas Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry), Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon) and Samira's father Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh) are as revered in the world film community as they are anonymous at American 'plexes...
...Gabbeh Tough heroes, winsome kids, things that blow up in the night--can there be another way to make movies? Yes, in this lyrical fable of a woman who literally lives in the weave of a carpet while she awaits her lost love. Iran's Mohsen Makhmalbaf is a weaver too, of sweet dreams, vivid colors and magical filmmaking...
Perhaps a semidocumentary about the nomadic Ghashghai goatherds and carpetmakers of southeastern Iran is not your idea of a fun night at the 'plex. Yet Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh is a visual wonder, folkloric and folk-lyrical. Color has rarely been used so sumptuously as in this fable of Gabbeh (Shaghayegh Djodat), a beautiful young woman whose marriage to a dashing horseman her father keeps postponing. Gabbeh means carpet, and the young woman is a kind of textile goddess weaving a spell over the proceedings. She must watch the painful birth of a calf, the playful bickering...
...from other countries. France, for example, makes beguiling little conversation pieces, like Ridicule and Comment je me suis dispute (ma vie sexuelle), a three-hour talkathon that plays like six consecutive episodes of a French Friends. Iran, of all places, is the hot new movie culture--Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh registered as the festival's most folk-artful charmer--while the once estimable cinemas of Japan, Eastern Europe and Latin America have gone into hibernation...