Word: makhmalbaf
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...While Rosie and Xiu Xiu present complex themes that abounded at the festival, they cannot possibly represent the diverse range of films. Maggie Hadleigh-West's documentary War Zone explores street harassment and sexist catcalls across America. In Apple, young Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf captures twin girls viewing the outside world for the first time. Some films were less enlightening and simply plodding, such as Maria Ripoll's romantic comedy Once Upon a Yesterday, which features second chances and fate...
...child's arm stretches out, as far as it can, to pour water from a cup onto a scruffy potted plant. This, the first image in Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple, introduces with poetic clarity the film's strange, true story: of 12-year-old twin girls imprisoned by their father in their Tehran home, away from sunlight, from the friendship of other kids, from the smallest ecstasies and exasperations of childhood. This wise, poignant film was made under unusual circumstances. The father and the girls were persuaded to play themselves, and Makhmalbaf was only 17 when she shot...
...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...