Although these agendas are obviously interconnected, they're treated in very different styles. An expatriate living in New York, Neshat has two large agendas here - to convey the political maelstrom of the time and to capture the parallel plight of Iranian women, tacitly showing how this sad history keeps repeating itself. The problem is easy to spot: too much ambition, too little coherence. Alas, in this particular case, it's a greater shame than a movie. All three - the novel, the video art and the film - are currently banned in Iran, which is a great shame.
SHIRIN IN SHAHRZAD SERIES SERIES
The source material is a Persian magic-realism novel, turned by director Shirin Neshat first into a series of video-art installations and then into this feature film. Instead, it's an archly poetic, earnestly symbolic treatise trying awfully hard to be an
Women Without Men is a useful reminder of who poisoned the well of Iranian democracy, and why. Set during the final weeks of that brief interlude, No doubt, Mossadegh possessed enemies inside the country, but they weren't nearly as powerful as those oil-guzzling enemies outside, who conspired to overthrow him, thereby returning Iran to its time-honoured state of repression, first as an autocratic monarchy and now as an equally autocratic theocracy. At the time, democracy had the temerity to nationalize the oil wells, immediately incurring the wrath of its fellow democracies in Britain and the United States. Only once has democracy reigned in the long history of Iran, for a few short years in the early fifties under then-prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
SHIRIN IN SHAHRZAD SERIES MOVIE
“I think that dreams are quite universal and often a manifestation of our fears, and our fears as human beings are very common whether you’re Iranian, Italian, American,” she told Fred Film Radio as she presented her movie in Venice. Neshat said she was obsessed with dreams for many years in her video work and films. Haunted by her father’s execution after the Islamic Revolution, Simin has developed a coping mechanism through a world of fantasy and play acting, capturing her interviewees’ dreams, secretly impersonating them in Farsi, and publishing them on social media for a growing Iranian audience. She is torn between her compassion for those whose dreams she is recording and a truth she must find within. Unaware of this devious plot, Simin goes door-to-door asking citizens to recount their dreams. It’s the story of Simin Hakak, an Iranian woman who works as a dreamcatcher for the US Census Bureau which, in an effort to control its citizens, has begun a program to record their dreams. It’s based on a story by Neshat, and takes place in the near future in a small town in the American West. Neshat’s movie “Land of Dreams” was co-directed by Shoja Azari and written by the late French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.
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