Amazing Stories

Today is the closing day of the Gothenburg Film Festival 2020. Through film I have travelled to five continents, met the most amazing people and have grown in understanding how little I know and comprehend of people’s lives and predicaments. A film festival is a great opportunity to see films from less known film countries that might otherwise never come to your attention. 

Yesterday I saw Among the Hills the debut film of the Iranian director Mohammad Reza Keivanfar. Keivanfar was a student of Abbas Kiarostami, who is widely considered as one of the most important directors of the past twenty years. Kiarostami once said:

“The calling of art is to bring us to a hidden truth that is difficult to access”.

One of the ways to take you there which both Keivanfar and Kiarostami use is to let you stay long enough in a situation so that it starts to find its way under your skin.

Among the Hills takes place in an incredibly beautiful landscape in a remote, unmentioned part of Iran, off the beaten track, far from civilisation. A young teacher comes to this desolate place to teach the children of its nomadic population. He finds his way to an old bus that previously has served as a school room for the children. 

To his surprise he only meets hostile attitudes. For these people education is not important. They have no use for it.  Their struggle is to live and survive. Possibly animal education might be useful so that the sheep do not die and lambs can be born. Girls as young as fourteen are given to marriage to give birth to children who can help to herd on the hills. The faces of girls are never shown. True contact is never established.

One day he gets a lift from another newcomer to this region. She is a female doctor who travels around in the hills to give medical aid. She has done that the past five years. At the end of the film they have a highly significant conversation about the possibility of having an impact on these people. She says that it does not matter how good the help is he wants to bring. If he is not willing to be with them, to listen, to learn and to become a friend, they will not receive it. 

In that conversation the director seems to imply that this story can happen anywhere, in any situation. If we come as an outsider to a new context, carrying with us evidently good things to pass on, but we are not willing to patiently invest in coming alongside them and to be a true participant and friend in their context, there will be no acceptance nor change. 

Other newly released films with deeply human stories I’ve seen on this festival and which I would recommend you to keep in mind in case they show up: 

• Nafi’s Father by Mamadou Dia from Senegal
• Steppe (Bozkir) by Ali Özel from Turkey
• You Will Die at Twenty by Amjad Abu Alala from Sudan
• Way Back Home by Sunjoo Park from South Korea

RB, Feb 2020

*image posted under fair use 
of copyright material in recommendation of the film

Recent Posts