Come, it’s already dusk
Part of the Iranian Film Festival at Rosebank, in Johannesburg.
Directed by Ensieh Shah Hosseini, like Puran Derakhshandeh, the director of the other two films we saw at the festival, a woman.
The movie is good, has several decent storylines intertwining and a few interesting characters. The leading female, a gypsy widow after her husband died at sea, is a bit too angry during the whole movie, but she’s quite pretty, so that’s okay.
The story is mostly about her being trapped, as part of her tribe, at some unnamed island in the Persian Gulf. She realises, almost too late, she actually has a chance of escaping with an engineer from up north.
As with the previous two movies we saw at the festival, the translator should have done a much better job to make the dialogues and the more delicate details of the story understandable for the audience. Here’s the write up from Mohammad Ahmadi’s website, the cinematographer:
A young gypsy woman who has fled her tribe falls in love with a fisherman in a remote island and they make a promise to get married but on their wedding night instead of himself the fisherman introduces his friend as the groom.
The woman is compelled to marry him and not long thereafter her husband drowns in the sea. Having regained her freedom she decides to take revenge against her disloyal lover.
At the end of the movie, in a dialogue between the woman and her disloyal lover, the delicate situation is explained, but not translated, and the non-Farsi speaking audience was clearly confused by the odd conclusion to the story.
In the festival programme, the name of the movie was giving as “Come, sun is setting”. However, the film itself opened with the translated title “Rush, it comes”. The write up in the festival programme also strongly suggested we were watching another movie as scheduled:
This is the story of the riparian people who do not easily give up struggling with the difficulties of daily life. These people are a shining example of friendship and devotion. In this film, the audience witnesses how a man’s love eventually leads to his self-sacrifice.
Trying to find information on the film, online, hoping to learn the actual title and some background information, it turns out there’s practically nothing online, not even on IMDB.
Usage of the term ‘riparian’ in the festival write up was typical for the translator of the movies: occasional use of correct English words practically no one has every heard of. Riparian means something like:
Relating to or living or located on the bank of a natural watercourse (as a river) or sometimes of a lake or a tidewater.
But this definition doesn’t help, at all, in the context of the movie. As the women in the movie, in public, wear wooden masks to hide their faces, the island on which the film is set is most likely near Minab, close to Hormoz Island and the straight of Hormoz.
Foto by elena senao
There is one great(above) and one not so great picture on Flickr of women wearing these masks. Interestingly, ethnologists believe the masks are leftover fashion items from when the Portuguese ruled the region.
The masks, interestingly enough, are believed by ethnologists to be leftover fashion statements from when the Portuguese ruled the region.