Marzieh Meshkini directs "Stray Dogs", a film whose title conjures up Kurosawa's "Stray Dog" but whose plot recalls De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" and Bunuel's "Los Olvidados".
The story? Zahed and Goi-Ghotai are a couple of streetwise kids – played not by professional actors but by real kids pulled from the slums of Kabul – who struggle to survive on the riverbanks of Kabul, the largest city in Afghanistan. With their parents in jail, the duo spend their days rummaging through filth and debris, desperately looking for anything they can eat, sell or burn for warmth. They aren't alone in their hardships, though, as Meshkini makes it clear that thousands of similar "lost children" populate the war torn country.
De Sica's influence is given a nod during one scene in which the kids watch "Bicycle Thieves" at a grimy theatre. Seeing the film gives them an idea. If they get arrested for stealing, they'll be thrown into jail and will therefore be put back into contact with their parents. Won't they?
Of course things go tragically wrong. Before this, however, the film touches upon the effects of the US-Taliban war in Afghanistan, Meshkini frequently cutting away to US war planes high in the sky. The slum children themselves express their contempt for the invaders by bullying a little dog (the stray dog of the title), an animal which eventually becomes a clunky metaphor for stolen childhood and the replacement of love with warfare.
Though the film is designed to show Western audiences the effect warfare and invasion (be it instigated by the US or Russia) have on foreign cultures and families, it's also critical of a certain outdated tribalism. For example, the father of our heroes is a Taliban who was moved to a mysterious US prison. With her husband absent for five years, the kids' mother then remarried, which in the eyes of both local law and culture makes her a "whore" and subject to death by stoning. So the film continually strikes a rare balance. It points out the adaptability and resourcefulness of children, whilst also pointing out their limitations, dependencies and fragility. Likewise, it denounces meddlesome foreign superpowers for the various dislocations they cause, as well as being critical of a certain backward, local tribalism.
Of course like most of these art-house, "humanitarian" films, "Stray Dogs" is doomed never to find the audience it's desperately trying to target. In contrast to similar works by Italian and Japanese film-makers during the 40s, all of which were spawned by conquered, war torn countries, and all of which featured lowly heroes navigating the rubble infested, post war ruins of Italy or Japan, this new wave of post Iraq/Afghanistan war films falls upon few eyeballs. In the mainstream, Michael Winterbottom's "In This World" and "The Road to Guantanamo" forced westerners to live through the eyes of those at the end of their government's gun-sights, but few watched even Winterbottom's relatively crowd pleasing works.
In contrast, European and Japanese cinema of the 1940s and early 50s, which tended to focus heavily on proletarians, peasants, homeless families and children, all of whom struggled to survive or climb out of the literal and economic rubble of World War 2 (and of course the droppings of the Atomic bombs), found no trouble finding audiences and critical praise. Indeed, these conflicts or traumas gave rise to a number of seminal films, such as "Germany, Year Zero", "Nettezza Urbana", "Bicycle Thieves", "La Terra Trema", "Stromboli", "Stray Dogs" and a slew of Japanese films I'm not and probably never will be familiar with. Which is not to say that Middle Eastern cinema, and Iranian cinema in particular, hasn't blossomed hugely in the past 2 decades, but that there's a sense that we're now simply getting the Middle Eastern versions of stories that more economically advanced countries already got out of their systems decades ago.
8/10 – Worth one viewing.
The story? Zahed and Goi-Ghotai are a couple of streetwise kids – played not by professional actors but by real kids pulled from the slums of Kabul – who struggle to survive on the riverbanks of Kabul, the largest city in Afghanistan. With their parents in jail, the duo spend their days rummaging through filth and debris, desperately looking for anything they can eat, sell or burn for warmth. They aren't alone in their hardships, though, as Meshkini makes it clear that thousands of similar "lost children" populate the war torn country.
De Sica's influence is given a nod during one scene in which the kids watch "Bicycle Thieves" at a grimy theatre. Seeing the film gives them an idea. If they get arrested for stealing, they'll be thrown into jail and will therefore be put back into contact with their parents. Won't they?
Of course things go tragically wrong. Before this, however, the film touches upon the effects of the US-Taliban war in Afghanistan, Meshkini frequently cutting away to US war planes high in the sky. The slum children themselves express their contempt for the invaders by bullying a little dog (the stray dog of the title), an animal which eventually becomes a clunky metaphor for stolen childhood and the replacement of love with warfare.
Though the film is designed to show Western audiences the effect warfare and invasion (be it instigated by the US or Russia) have on foreign cultures and families, it's also critical of a certain outdated tribalism. For example, the father of our heroes is a Taliban who was moved to a mysterious US prison. With her husband absent for five years, the kids' mother then remarried, which in the eyes of both local law and culture makes her a "whore" and subject to death by stoning. So the film continually strikes a rare balance. It points out the adaptability and resourcefulness of children, whilst also pointing out their limitations, dependencies and fragility. Likewise, it denounces meddlesome foreign superpowers for the various dislocations they cause, as well as being critical of a certain backward, local tribalism.
Of course like most of these art-house, "humanitarian" films, "Stray Dogs" is doomed never to find the audience it's desperately trying to target. In contrast to similar works by Italian and Japanese film-makers during the 40s, all of which were spawned by conquered, war torn countries, and all of which featured lowly heroes navigating the rubble infested, post war ruins of Italy or Japan, this new wave of post Iraq/Afghanistan war films falls upon few eyeballs. In the mainstream, Michael Winterbottom's "In This World" and "The Road to Guantanamo" forced westerners to live through the eyes of those at the end of their government's gun-sights, but few watched even Winterbottom's relatively crowd pleasing works.
In contrast, European and Japanese cinema of the 1940s and early 50s, which tended to focus heavily on proletarians, peasants, homeless families and children, all of whom struggled to survive or climb out of the literal and economic rubble of World War 2 (and of course the droppings of the Atomic bombs), found no trouble finding audiences and critical praise. Indeed, these conflicts or traumas gave rise to a number of seminal films, such as "Germany, Year Zero", "Nettezza Urbana", "Bicycle Thieves", "La Terra Trema", "Stromboli", "Stray Dogs" and a slew of Japanese films I'm not and probably never will be familiar with. Which is not to say that Middle Eastern cinema, and Iranian cinema in particular, hasn't blossomed hugely in the past 2 decades, but that there's a sense that we're now simply getting the Middle Eastern versions of stories that more economically advanced countries already got out of their systems decades ago.
8/10 – Worth one viewing.