Losing their way in the Middle East

There are a pair of
40-minute Middle Eastern films screening at the Dryden Theatre this Saturday
(September 6). Each makes its Rochester debut and each arrives with buckets
full of praise from people whose hearts go out to the ridiculously oppressed
citizens of the countries represented by the shorts (Yemen and Iran).

            I don’t know if I was in a particularly foul mood when I
watched them (admittedly, it was the same night Jack got the boot on Big Brother), but neither The
Lost Film nor Trial did much for me. In fact, each
came close to being a little silly. Let’s break it on down and see if I was off
my nut or really do have an uncanny ability to see through a storm of BS.

            Lebanese filmmaking team Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil
Joreige once made a film called Around
the Pink House. On the 10th anniversary of the unification of Yemen, a copy
of said film disappeared from said country under purportedly mysterious
circumstances. A year later, they took their cameras to Yemen, where movies are
considered to be sinful, in an attempt to learn what happened to their print of
House.

            What follows is the cinematic equivalent of wearing a New
York Yankees jersey into the bleachers at Fenway Park. Hadjithomas and Joreige
come off as crazy paranoids, and they should be, too. They’re doing something
they know they shouldn’t be doing, which is especially irritating when we all
know their search is going to be completely fruitless. And they do it all
wearing Western clothing!

            But wait — there’s more. Moslem Mansouri’s Trial is a documentary whose subject is
equal parts Cecil B. Demented and Harvey Pekar. There’s a guy in Khosro —- a
brickmaker by trade — who has written a ton of books and made a
dozen-and-a-half 8mm films. That’s all illegal without governmental permission
in Iran (as should making films like Le
Divorce be in this country), so this guy was sent to the slammer for
several years until he promised not to do either again. What’s more, they made
every resident in Khosro sign an agreement saying they’d all go to the clink if
they helped him with his dusty multimedia empire.

            So in Trial,
this guy jeopardizes his neighbors by making one last film, just so Mansouri
can record the process. We get to see his guerrilla-style pictures, which are
typically about his life and his job and his co-workers and his friends. But Trial boils down to a documentarian
potentially securing for an entire village a one-way ticket to the pokey, while
also providing additional proof (via film) of their crime. This would be like
somebody aiding O.J. Simpson’s defense by videotaping his ex-wife’s
decapitation. And how funny would it have been if Mansouri showed us clips of
this guy’s films, and he turned out to be like an Iranian Ed Wood?

Interested in raw,
unsanitized movie ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy (www.sick-boy.com),
or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.

This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2003.