My Tehran for Sale - my review

My Tehran for Sale, the first Iranian-Australian feature collaboration, is now available on DVD in Australia - my review is at the SBS website.

Extract:

A few years ago the animation Persepolis offered an eye-opening look into lives and values of middle-class secular Iranians, showing the common idea of a nation of Islamic fundamentalists to be mistaken.

The live action My Tehran for Sale – which is billed as the first Australian-Iranian feature collaboration – gives a comparable, albeit less dramatic, glimpse into the everyday life of educated young Iranians living under an oppressive regime. Marzieh Vafamehr plays Marzieh, a young actress whose pleasures and freedoms are eked out illegally, where there is always the possibility of discovery and punishment.

Wings of Desire re-examined

This month offers a valuable opportunity to revisit and re-examine an acknowledged German cinema classic of the past 25 years with World Movies broadcasts of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire on December 3, 19 and 20.

Over at the website of the German cultural body, Goethe-Institut Australia, I kick off a new monthly blog with a post looking back at the 1987 film and the divided Berlin it so poetically captured.

Extract:

Scarcely none of the film’s locations still exist. Not only the Wall (now almost entirely demolished, as many tourists are surprised to discover), but also the unkempt spaces that pockmarked the old West Berlin. Real estate would finally get its act together and notice the waste ground that hosted the circus where Bruno Ganz’s angel fell for Solveig Dommartin’s angelic trapeze artist, and the elegant old theatre serving as a venue for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. No longer markers of a terrible recent history, these became valuable properties, ripe for redevelopment as supermarkets, blocks of flats, service stations - artefacts needed by Berliners, though possibly not by Berlin.

Most dramatically transformed today is Potsdamer Platz on the border between east and west. Now a glitteringly sterile complex of postmodernist office towers, a symbol of western consumerism and pleasure-seeking packed with shopping malls, luxury hotels and cinema megaplexes, the Platz displayed here is a terrible reminder of history, a bleak and almost unimaginably vast no-man’s-land bounded by the Wall and its guard towers. Wenders’ camera tours through the devastation, using as his guide a Holocaust survivor unable to make sense of history’s erasure of the lively and elegant café scene he recalled from his youth inthe 1920s and '30s.

Thanks to the remarkable and (mostly) black and white camerawork of France’s Henri Alekan (who had shot, among many other films, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Wyler’s Roman Holiday), even the film’s ugliest locations, such as this, retain a striking beauty, reflecting the affection with which Wenders regarded the city to which he had just returned following eight years living and working in the United States. Note that Wenders names the circus after Alekan, his way of dedicating the film to the veteran cinematographer (who died in 2001)...

For the full post, see here.