08-21-2009, 08:18 PM
Blackboards directed by Samira Makhmalbaf (Iranian -- 2000)
Few movies are more uplifting than those that show an intellectual awakening. Can anyone forget Patty Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, at the moment she finally "gets it?" That was the basis for my renting this movie.
Six Iranian school teachers with blackboards strapped to their backs head into the mountains to find pupils. Two of them, Said and Reeboir, soon split from the group, and they themselves then go in separate directions. Reeboir eventually joins a band of illiterate children who smuggle stolen goods across the border. Said joins a band of Kurdish refugees, most of them elderly, who want to return to their ancestral homelands. Despite Said and Reeboir's best attempts to teach those around them, it goes for naught, and their blackboards -- symbol of a better life through the power of education -- are used instead in various ways for survival.
Reeboir finds one boy who does want to learn, but that boy is ultimately killed in a firefight. Said leads the Kurdish refugees back to their homeland, but they don't recognize it and tell him it's not the right place. Said must grimly tell them it is. "It's the war," he explains. "The war has changed it."
This is a movie about people who have no possessions and nowhere to go, and about the irrelevance of education in a desperate and turbulent world. "Despair" sums it up very nicely. And yes, this was the most depressing movie I've ever seen.
Rumor has it that the young female director is working on a sequel, to be titled Whiteboards. I can hardly effing wait.
Few movies are more uplifting than those that show an intellectual awakening. Can anyone forget Patty Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, at the moment she finally "gets it?" That was the basis for my renting this movie.
Six Iranian school teachers with blackboards strapped to their backs head into the mountains to find pupils. Two of them, Said and Reeboir, soon split from the group, and they themselves then go in separate directions. Reeboir eventually joins a band of illiterate children who smuggle stolen goods across the border. Said joins a band of Kurdish refugees, most of them elderly, who want to return to their ancestral homelands. Despite Said and Reeboir's best attempts to teach those around them, it goes for naught, and their blackboards -- symbol of a better life through the power of education -- are used instead in various ways for survival.
Reeboir finds one boy who does want to learn, but that boy is ultimately killed in a firefight. Said leads the Kurdish refugees back to their homeland, but they don't recognize it and tell him it's not the right place. Said must grimly tell them it is. "It's the war," he explains. "The war has changed it."
This is a movie about people who have no possessions and nowhere to go, and about the irrelevance of education in a desperate and turbulent world. "Despair" sums it up very nicely. And yes, this was the most depressing movie I've ever seen.
Rumor has it that the young female director is working on a sequel, to be titled Whiteboards. I can hardly effing wait.
