The Makhmalbaf Clan

In Europe, the name Makhmalbaf represents Iranian cinema. The Makhmalbaf family has put forth no less than five directors. Amin Farzanefar reports on the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of a clan structure.

photo: makhmalbaf.com
The Makhmalbaf family in 2004

​​At age 24, Samira Makhmalbaf already belongs to the cineastic elite. After her films "The Apple" (1998) and "Blackboards" (2000) won numerous awards, she went to the neighboring country of Afghanistan – a cinematic desert – to make "At Five in the Afternoon." Awash in fairytale colors, the film intertwines different stories of individual destiny in the post-Taliban era, where misery and hope exist side by side.

The young protagonist Nogreh, sent by her father to Koran school, drapes her burka over her head, opens an umbrella, and scuttles to the girls' school in pumps. Her goal: she wants to become president.

Crossing boundaries between conformity to traditional expectations and a will to self-determination are also found in Marzieh Meshkini's "The Day I Became a Woman" (2000), in which three episodes relay the childhood, youth and old-age of an Iranian woman. In the second sequence, a young woman takes part in a bicycle race against her family's wishes and is repeatedly chased by her male relatives and even the village priest, only to cycle away from them again. This film in particular offers an impressive example of the aesthetics of Iranian arthouse cinema.

With a minimum of technical expenditure, these films convey an abundance of atmosphere, meaning and social context. Both films are from the inner-circle of the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who directed "Kandahar" and who is along with Abbas Kiarostami one of the most successful Iranian directors known internationally.

Fostering talent in the living room

Already in 1987 Makhmalbaf's daughter Samira played a role in the film "The Cyclist," and 36-year-old Marzieh Meshkini is his second wife and previously his sister-in-law. A former director of propaganda films who has a biography worth filming in itself, Mohsen Makhmalbaf established the "Makhmalbaf Film House" and thereby created a kind of monopoly in Iran.

A fixed clan of cinematographers and actors constantly come together to work on new projects. The family members mutually hire one another for work in screenplay writing, still photography and directing assistance, and Makhmalbaf himself is currently engaged primarily as a producer.

This form of collective cinema provides a way of countering the rigid Iranian censorship apparatus by creating its own structures, partly outsourced to Europe. Makhmalbaf also sponsors young creative talent with his own film school. The Afghani film "Osama," an anti-Taliban decree by Siddiq Barmak, was made possible with Makhmalbaf's strong support.

Us and them, here and there

On the other hand, this family-operated business has become a clique with its own power to define the issues to be addressed. The clan members have authority over the way Iran gets represented to the West. And the Middle East, as they present it to us, remains more deeply trapped in Orientalized clichés than the neorealist gloss over their films belies at first glance.

The latest Makhmalbaf films present us with more scenes of repression and poverty in rural areas – in a colorful and folklorist getup. The romantic arte povera of arthouse cinema may cater to expectations in the West more than it shows us the actual conditions in the area.

Our movie theaters don't show, for example, the new Iranian blockbuster hits. For a long time these were B-movie action flicks, hysterical domestic melodramas, and silly – though hardly funny – comedies, but now an avant-garde has developed within the mainstream. Sacred cows are no longer holy, and headscarves are being tugged at. The current cult film that has become a scandal is "Marmulak," in which a mullah is exposed as the oversized hypocrite that everyone holds him for.

Cities, countrysides, films in flux

It can hardly be claimed that Iran and neighboring countries are a fountain of generosity and wealth. There are still massive deficits in democracy, problems for women, underdevelopment – and beautiful landscapes. But the great changes in contemporary realities and the apparently contradictory coexistence of pre-modern lifestyles and an urban slacker pop culture in Tehran are missing in the Makhmalbafs' films, in which the whole country seems to consist only of suburbs and provinces.

And the clan constantly produces new folklorist blossoms, mostly all of the same kind. The first graduates of the "Makhmalbaf Film School," the festival stars of tomorrow, are the director's own children. Twenty-two-year-old Maysam created the film "How Samira Made the Blackboard," a portrait of his famous sister. He shows her as a dedicated and talented director – clearly a counter to the general suspicion that her father had been pulling all the strings. He also exposes a great deal of coquetry and hysterical self-marketing strategies.

Having already produced a few photo series, some poetry and a short film at the tender age of nine, the youngest in the brood, Hana, has now finished "Joy of Madness," a making-of film about Samira's "At Five in the Afternoon."

Through the camera-eye of this sixteen-year-old, the Iranian film crew appears like a colonialist expedition corps. In the middle of a war-torn land, the star director subjects a few Afghans to an extreme casting session for her sentimental stories. For the role of a half starved child, she casts a half starved child. Somewhere in the background Papa Makhmalbaf is heard shouting: "We really need a baby! I'll pay anyone a lot of money if they bring me a baby!"

Amin Farzanefar

© Fluter.de, 30.6.2004

Translation from German: Christina M. White