Blackboards

Awarded the Prix du Jury at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and rightly praised upon release, Samira Makhmalbaf's lyrical, transcendental Blackboards is given a timely DVD release. Though ideally suited to the big screen where the film's visual scope and splendor is readily apparent, the film still impresses on the small screen and the DVD extra features act as a further incentive to re-view.

First and foremost, Blackboards offers continued evidence of an astoundingly mature female voice in Iranian cinema and builds upon the promise displayed in The Apple (1998), Makhmalbaf's assured debut, made at the tender age of 18. Broader in scope, Blackboards again features the guiding influence of the venerable Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who as well as producing (the perceptive, almost apocalyptic script was a collaborative affair between father and daughter) appears in an editing capacity, constructing and juxtaposing events with edifying precision and clarity. But to magnify the input of the elder Makhmalbaf would be to detract from Samira's own accomplishments. With Blackboards she has produced a startling work, an intelligent, deceptively simplistic but profoundly humanist mediation on the values of knowledge, education and the affects of cultural and geographical displacement.

The film unfolds in Iranian Kurdistan, near the border with Iraq where a group of nomadic teachers who carry their blackboards strapped to their backs for protection from an unseen military enemy wander the barren mountainous terrain in search of pupils with whom they wish to swap education for sustenance. Following an attack from an army helicopter the teachers become separated. One, Said (Saeed Mohamadi), falls in with a group of similarly shifting wanderers from Iraq trying to make their perilous way back home. Winning the trust of the group by using his board as transport for an elderly member of the group, Said then attempts to win the hand of the old man's daughter Hahaleh (Behnaz Jafari) by offering his board as dowry. Meanwhile, fellow teacher Reeboir (Bahman Ghobadi) finds himself amongst a party of young boys for whom education has little value. Hardened against the harsh realities of existence in the mountains, the boys attempt to survive by smuggling contraband goods across the Iraqi/Iranian border.

Makhmalbaf and director of photography Ebrahim Ghafouri make the most of the arduous filming conditions to create a visual canvas both tellingly realistic - the sense of suffering and hardship is intense and palpable - and yet at times distinctly surreal in which the literal and the metaphorical magically entwine. Powered by naturalistic performances from her troupe of largely non-professional actors (a defining motif of Iranian cinema, it would seem) and shot through with a devastating undercurrent of pessimism, even in light of such recent jewels as The Circle, The Wind Will Carry Us and A Time For Drunken Horses Blackboards stands out as a magnificent work: acerbic, moving and politically astute.

As with all Artificial Eye releases the DVD transfer is pristine and the film offers not only standard extras (the theatrical trailer and production notes) but also an extremely illuminating Making Of documentary featurette which goes some way to detailing the difficult conditions faced by the cast and crew.

Reviewed by Jason Wood