THREE FACES (Se Rokh) Jafar Panahi (Iran)
Behnaz, a famous actress in Iran, receives a video from a young girl pleading for her help—threatening suicide—to escape her conservative family. Along with a friend (the director plays himself), she decides to visit the young girl’s small mountain village in a region where ancestral traditions still shape local life.
The director offers us this delicate, almost modest, confrontation between modernity and traditionalism. Naturally, it is the women (the actress, the young girl, her artist friend, poorly regarded in the village) who embody this aspiration for freedom against conservatism more than religion (Tehran and its ayatollahs seem far away).
Panahi’s film (who can’t resist enriching us with a few intimate scenes… in a car, his specialty since Tehran Taxi) is often moving, sometimes funny, but mostly filled with hope. In Iran, perhaps more than elsewhere, women are indeed the future of men…
GIRLS OF THE SUN Eva Husson (France)
In Kurdistan, Bahar, commander of the battalion “Girls of the Sun,” a former sexual slave of Daesh, prepares to liberate her city from the men in black, hoping to find her son. A French journalist arrives to cover the offensive and bear witness.
Filmmakers have often been criticized for their inability to address contemporary political subjects, so the courage of young director Eva Husson should be applauded. An ambitious, important, and useful film that bears witness to the courage of Kurdish women who have taken up arms against their Islamist oppressors. It’s unfortunate that several flaws reduce the film’s effectiveness: the lead actress lacks depth, the character of the journalist feels artificial, the script, by creating false suspense, is shaky, and some scenes are overdone… Evidently, the film would have benefited from being programmed in a parallel section.
But thanks to the film, how can we not keep in our hearts the image of these women fighting, as the heroine repeats, for “Women, Life, Freedom.”
