Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

roland-104 This is an ingenious, scathingly ironic, highly critical allegory about conditions today in Iran, written by the director, Mohammad Rasoulof. Nearly the entire drama takes place on an old, disabled oil tanker that is very slowly sinking into the sea. The ship is crammed with people of all ages and varying life stations, though there does not appear to be anyone on board who's rich.There are also animals, people tending vegetable gardens, a cleverly rigged cell phone service. Everyone is put to work, has a role to play. A wheelchair bound young man with cerebral palsy manages the rickety lift that transports people and goods up and down to the water line. A youngster ("Baby Fish") picks up small fish trapped below decks and returns them to the sea.The enterprise is run – better, micromanaged - with an iron hand by Captain Nemat (Ali Nassirian). He's everywhere: checking out every worker on the job, greeting newcomers and settling them in, brokering marriage contracts, tending to the needs of the ill and impoverished, ordering tools and goods from the mainland on his cell (he's the only one aboard with a personal phone), dickering with the ship's owners, who want to evacuate everyone and sell the old hulk to a scrapper.Unbeknownst to them, a major source of income for this floating colony is torching away pieces of the vessel and selling them to a scrapper. The costs of goods like purchased food and medicines is deducted from people's pay, like a company store operates.There is a school aboard ship, run by an enlightened, middle aged teacher who is keenly resourceful. For example, he makes his own blackboard chalk sticks using old bullet casings for molds, a marvelous spin of the traditional image of turning swords into ploughshares. This school is no madrasa: he teaches natural science and the 3 R's to a coed lot of kids of all ages (a family arrives with three teen daughters, none of whom has ever been to school, the teacher quickly learns).Capt. Nemat is not happy about this school or its teacher's ways. He bickers with the teacher about the latter's measurements that demonstrate how rapidly the ship is sinking: at the rate he estimates, it will only stay afloat for a few more years. Nemat dismisses this as a spurious finding. He finds any pretext to interrupt classes. One day it's a ship-wide celebration. Another day it's a need for the kids to aid in a special work project. Still later Nemat insists that two donkeys must be housed in the classroom.Nemat also insists that women wear burkas, and have traditionally arranged marriages. He metes out harsh punishment to those who transgress the rules, like young Ahmad, who keeps hitting on a girl Nemat deems too good for him, and who later tries to escape the ship. In an act of obvious defiance, the teacher, displaced by the donkeys, draws a chalk face: a woman without a burka.A major breakthrough occurs: workers are finally able to tap into the oil reserves tanked below decks. Oil in partly filled drums is floated to land and sold. But even with that development, Capt. Nemat cannot fend off the evacuation demands of the ship's owners. So he forces everyone to grant him their powers of attorney in order to wheel and deal on their behalf as he chooses. His choice is to have everyone leave the ship, but not in order to end their isolation.Quite to the contrary, Nemat directs his people to establish a new home, far removed from civilization, on a bleak patch of desert. They will start over, from scratch. The metaphor for a logical conclusion to radical Muslim fundamentalism could not be more clear.Subject to the usual caveat that everybody shouts at the top their lungs, even when standing nose to nose, a style that is common and annoying in Iranian film dialogue, this is a sensational film, and one can only marvel that it was made in the first place, let alone exported to the West. My grade: B+ 8/10.

noralee "Iron Island (Jazireh ahani)" vividly works on at least three levels. Opening with a prayer, the premise itself is visually arresting and the story is simple but imaginative. Settled on an abandoned oil freighter off the coast of an unnamed Middle East peninsula, a rag tag community of squatters is ruled by a wheeling-dealing landlord, a benevolent, Messianic dictator of a captain, like out of a Werner Herzog film, controlling a limited barter economy with the outside world. The huge hulking ship in the bright blue sea is eye-popping, but it even feels like writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof is just pointing his camera at at a documentary of how traditional families adapt to such a physical and economic environment while retaining their social structure with its rigid gender and age stratification. I equally believed, on the one hand, this could be a post-apocalyptic society as in the "Mad Max" movies or "Waterworld", the new "Battlestar Galactica" or even "Land of the Dead" or, on the other, that it could even have been based on a true story, as much as "Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)" was based on a real incident in Japan of abandoned children.But it works equally well visually, emotionally and intellectually as a brilliant allegory, not necessarily of Iran but of any traditional, isolated society with a rotting infrastructure, selling off its resources and émigrés to global capitalism and living off the promises and lies of its paternalistic leaders.Working under the captain's watchful eye, the frustrated school teacher, a Cassandra-like scientist, uses the Islamic madrassas style of repetitive memorization. But with only old newspapers about a mysterious war and enemy as texts, the students are required to repeat truisms about the glories of living on the sea. Unfortunately, the English subtitles do not translate what is on the black board so some subtleties are doubtless lost.Just as any society has channeled restless adolescent boys into armies, the "Captain" (a marvelously oily and charismatic Ali Nassirian) organizes the boys on board into teams of coordinated manual labor to salvage resources on the ship that have the breathtaking look of "Nanook of the North" teams ritualistically pulling together for a common goal and their choreography is a wonder. Even so, they still keep trying to get snatches of contact to the outside world with satellite TV and radio.But we get caught up on in the story of one of these adolescents, his assistant, a lovelorn orphan (played by Hossein Farzi-Zadeh who also movingly played a similar young man in "Beautiful City (Shah-re ziba)"), who stands up to him, recalling "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", or a more cerebral "Star Wars", with an even more dramatically wrenching rebellion. How young love finds an outlet even through elaborate burhkas is a touching tribute to the universality of the human spirit. The audience held their breaths as to who would win the battle of wits and endurance.Women are especially ground under in this patriarchal society, with physical and labor restrictions and barely puberty arranged marriages around issues of honor. A lack of health care particularly affects the constantly pregnant, child-caring women.The premise doesn't make 100% practical sense and the ending is so ambiguous that the guy next to me optimistically thought it was happy for all, while I was cynically dismayed. But the images are unforgettable.

Chris Knipp Iron Island (Jezireh ahani 2005), the second film written and directed by Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof, is a loosely constructed parable. Rasoulof conceived his tale originally as a theater piece, then turned it into a film by adopting a derelict oil tanker in the Persian Gulf as the setting and populating it with non-actors, sunni ethnic Arab Bandaris, a marginal group in Iran. The resulting style is a cross between Makhmalbaf and post-war Italian neorealism. One might think of the rusty ship with its squatters as like the shantytown in De Sica and Zavattini's Miracle in Milan, but things here are grimmer and more elemental. Everything revolves around a kind of benevolent dictator, a "Captain" (well-known actor Ali Nasirian), who cuts deals, settles disputes, and gives out orders. The Captain's full of friendly greetings for everybody but up close is an exploiter and not to be trusted. How all these people wound up here is a mystery but it provides Rasoulof with a ready-made microcosm. The meanings are up to you. There's crude oil on the ship and a gang of boys the Captain keeps working for him carry it and carved off scrap iron and sell both to buyers on land. Later the boys find a TV and get it working but the Captain grabs it and throws it overboard in anger. There's a teacher who teaches his charges to read using old newspapers and explains that the ship is in the sea and the sea is beautiful and is part of the world. Later when things get complicated because the Captain is going to give up the ship he removes the students and leaves the teacher to make chalk and give lessons to an empty classroom, and donkeys are stabled there instead. There's a special boy named Ahmad (Hossein Farzi-Zadeh) whom the Captain has adopted as his protégé but rather looks down on. The boy's in love with a girl on board, but she's to marry an older man the captain has arranged and he forbids Ahmad to go near her. But he cannot obey. Things are bartered and in one brief but highly charged scene Ahmad and the betrothed girl he fancies without seeing each other exchange clothing -- his T-shirt; her veil -- back and forth on a rope, as if they're undressing for each other and also trading love tokens. When the wedding takes place, in his frustration Ahmad steals the Captain's motorboat and escapes from the ship, but he's caught and subjected to cruel water torture with the entire community watching on deck: now we know this dictator isn't really so benevolent after all. The Bandari women wear veils that look like Venetian carnival masks. There's a dark, bright-eyed little boy people call Fish who rescues aquatic creatures who've slipped into the hold and takes them up and frees them. There's an old man in shades who stands outside looking at the sun all day, awaiting a sign. There's a handicapped boy whose daily assignment is to operate the mechanized lift that's used to bring people up and down from the ship. He also gets to carry out the water torture -- because Ahmad, bound hand and foot, is lowered into the sea on the lift -- and he revels in it. The teacher has been conducting a test that shows the ship is sinking. The captain rejects this assertion at first, but bowing to the inevitable in time gets everybody on board to sign over power of attorney to him, takes them on a "pilgrimage" to the desert, and sells the ship to businessmen for scrap. He promises the people will have a town that will be beautiful, but we don't believe him. The last images are of Fish trying to save fishes along the shore – he has run away, but his project seems more futile than ever, though just as sweet. Rasoulof's narrative is rather haphazard. At times it seemed to me the relationships might have had more depth if the people were presented in an ordinary community, the boy's longing for the betrothed girl, for instance, and the schoolteacher whose classroom is at the whim of a local mayor. What would have become of the boy freeing fishes and the old man staring at the sun in normal conditions I don't know. The rusty ship may have struck the director as a wonderful idea but it turns out to be a bit of an albatross, a weighty but empty metaphor distracting us from more interesting human detail. But since this captain and his arbitrary world sticks in the mind, perhaps the whole thing wasn't such a bad idea after all. The cinematography makes good use of the authentic faces and the natural, often very low light – contrasting with dazzling moments of sun. There are really three films here: one composed of of lovely images, another of rough parables, a third of social anecdotes. J.Hoberman wondered in his review how this film was shown at home and what it would mean there. It was shown in the New Directors/New Films series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (March 2006) and then at Cinema Village, also in New York, but the film hasn't been shown in Iran yet, so those questions can't yet be answered. ©Chris Knipp 2006

paterfam001 I was most impressed by this movie, especially since I was going to it (with my wife) out of a sense of duty: it wasn't one of my choices at Toronto Film Festival. Frankly, I expected to be baffled and bored, as I have been by terribly earnest subtitled movies in the past. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it held my interest from the first scene. The unusual setting had a great deal to do with this -- the ship's crumbling superstructure, its dank and scary innards, the small domestic comforts of its tenants, the vast watery landscape outside -- all beautifully filmed. You are dumped right into the middle of all this, as if you were one of the tenants newly arrived, and watch a newbie get the full treatment from the Captain -- the leader and self-styled benefactor of this band of poor outcasts. You find your way around and get to know the people and their ways, but this is not a documentary, nor does it pretend to be. Our interest is not sociological, but just human. The Captain is at the centre of all this, and his character is at issue throughout. Is he really a saviour and benefactor, or is he just using the young men on board as a source of cheap (free, actually) labour so he can steal the remaining crude oil and valuable parts from the ship, before its owners send it to be cut up for scrap? By the time you have absorbed enough of the narrative to wonder about this, you have grown acquainted enough with the tenants' problems and aspirations to care deeply about this, and to follow his actions with keen attention. In the end, the viewer has to make up his own mind about the character of the man, the rightness of his actions. There is no foregone conclusion.