Iran has been in the US news for over 30 years as the arch-demon of the west, at least since the Iran Hostage crisis of November of 1979 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, if not from the months of revolution from August 1978 to the entry of the Ayotallah Ruhollah Komeiniein January of 1979. The shakers and makers of America’s ruling oligarchs were particularly incensed by the immorality of it all when the Shah of Iran was chased into exile and bounced around the world seeking treatment for the cancer that eventually killed him.
Nor has the image changed much in the last decade as Mahmoud Amadinejad, the Iranian President,seems to delight in showing himself as unpredictable to the point of zaniness, a wide and popular protest movement has been crushed, with jailings, killings and torture, and has Iran has single-mindedly pursued a nuclear policy that has scared the bejesus out of the west.
It has seemed a nation in the grip of the lunatic, the impenetrable and the religiously crazed.
So that makes it a good time to examine our knowledge of the country and the people, see what that knowledge consists of and what might be added to it, lest we as a nation become dangerously addled ourselves and support destructive policies taken in our name against people we have consigned to being below the insect kingdom
The Song of Sparrows, a 2008 movie by Majid Majidi [also Children of Heaven, 1997, The Color of Paradise, 1999, and Baran, 2007] is a wonderful place to start. You will see the beguiling, soulful eyed Mohammad Amir Naji (with a nose to put Depardieu, or Cyrano himself, to shame) as Karim, the beleaguered father of three trying to make a mid-life career change like one you’ve never imagined. You will see what it means to love an ostrich, and how to herd them, how children are raised in a poor household in Iran. You will see a taxi driver like none you’ve ever seen.
On the same day his partially deaf daughter loses her hearing aid, and is in danger of failing her upcoming exams, Karim is fired from his job as an ostrich handler. Life is grim but, optimistic, he takes his trusty motor cycle — what, 200 ccs?– into Tehran. As he is standing by it in the crush of daily traffic – pedestrian and auto– a business man jumps on the rear platform and orders him off to an address unknown. The man doesn’t stop talking on his cell phone the whole way. And a new world opens up to Karim — and even more, to us. How many items can be loaded on the back of a motorcycle? How are dishwashers distributed in Tehran? What does the buzz of a modern market place sound like? You will discover it all!
Karim returns to his home every night to deal with Hussein [ Hamid Aghazi] his rambunctious son of about 12 who travels in a gang of neighborhood boys the same age. And you thought you had problems raising kids! The child’s performance is spot-on, whether in happiness or distress, or simply being a boy. Karim promises his daughter the hearing aid is on the way, again and again. She tells him not to worry, she can hear fine — which he lovingly disproves each time. He deals with household matters with his wife; they make decisions together in ways both familiar and unfamiliar to us. You’ll never be as intimate to Iranian family life of a certain (bare) economic bracket as in this movie. Event follows event, each more unimaginable to Euromerican eyes than the one before it, each giving way to solutions, of a kind, and to an eventual happy ending, of a kind.
What a wonderful film! And you’ll never see ostriches in the same way again….
Available at Netflix, streaming and DVD, and other on-line sources. Song of the Sparrow, 2009 Iranian submission to Academy Awards