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7 items from 2012
DVD Review: The Rafi Pitts Collection
22 May 2012 7:20 AM, PDT | CineVue | See recent CineVue news »
★★★☆☆ Released by Artificial Eye on 28 May, The Rafi Pitts Collection brings together three of the Iranian director's most pivotal films, from the pastoral drama of Sanam (2000) through to the Tehran-based, melancholic revenge movie The Hunter (2010), via his Berlinale hit It's Winter (2006). All three films share a focal interest in the role of men in modern Iran, and whilst Pitts may not quite be in the same league as your Jafar Panahis or Nuri Bilge Ceylan (both key exponents of Islam-centric cinema), he is undoubtedly a fluid storyteller.
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- CineVue
DVD Release: The Hunter (2010)
18 May 2012 3:10 PM, PDT | Disc Dish | See recent Disc Dish news »
Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 31, 2012
Price: DVD $29.95
Studio: Olive Films
Rafi Pitts retreats to the forest in The Hunter.
Iranian writer and director Rafi Pitts stars in his 2010 foreign language thriller The Hunter.
Pitts is Ali, an ex-con who makes the most of his return to a normal life by spending as much time possible with his wife and young daughter. To escape the stress of urban living, he retreats to his favorite pastime: hunting in the secluded forest north of town. After tragedy strikes his family, Ali loses control and randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is soon arrested by two other officers. But when the three men finds themselves lost in their wooded surroundings, the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted begin to change…
Following its well-received rollout to dozens of international film festivals and theatrical screenings, The Hunter played in U. »
- Laurence
Daily Briefing. Iranian Hardliners Vs the Oscar
5 February 2012 11:08 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »
With the Us and Israel insisting that "all options remain open, including military action, if Iran continues with its uranium enrichment program" and Iran snapping back that it'll stage "a reciprocal attack" if provoked, as the AP reports today, a little speed-bump in the Oscar race looks pretty damn trivial. Nonetheless, in today's Observer, Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports that "Masoud Ferasati, an Iranian writer whose views are close to those of the Islamic regime, said [recently on state-run television]: 'The image of our society that A Separation depicts is the dirty picture westerners are wishing for.' Ferasati added that political motivations were behind the many awards for Iranian films in the past two decades, and said an Oscar for A Separation should not be welcomed by Iranians." According to Dehghan, though, many "ordinary Iranians," have indeed welcomed the slew of awards Asghar Farhadi's film has garnered, beginning with the Golden and »
Notebook Reviews: Rafi Pitts’s “The Hunter”
9 January 2012 7:11 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »
Early in The Hunter, the brooding protagonist (played by writer-director Rafi Pitts, his face clenched like a fist) sets camp in the woods in the outskirts of Tehran, and the still, silent composition switches abruptly from day to night in the instant he takes to cock his rifle. Pitts, a chronicler of coiled despair with a limpid sense of negative space, maintains this terse combination of naturalism and impressionistic distillation as the taciturn character absorbs the injustices and tensions around him. The only job available for an ex-con is night watchman at a car factory, which leaves him with little time to see his wife and daughter. Set in the midst of Iran’s 2009 elections, the film sees the city as a procession of suffocating spaces—tunnels, industrial assembly lines, orphanages with endless rows of abandoned kids, narrow bureaucratic corridors—that can claim loved ones without batting an eye, as »
Rafi Pitts's "The Hunter"
5 January 2012 1:40 PM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »
In The Hunter, which was shot in the months just prior to the contentious Iranian presidential election in 2009 and then premiered at the Berlinale in 2010, writer-director Rafi Pitts plays Ali, a "taciturn graveyard-shift warehouse security guard, recently released from jail for a never-specified crime," as Melissa Anderson puts it in the Voice. "To avenge the deaths of his beloved wife and six-year-old daughter, killed during off-screen protests, Ali takes out two cops sniper-style and flees to a forest in the north. Pitts, who was born in 1967 in Iran and fled the country in 1981 for England, and cinematographer Mohammad Davudi frequently frame Ali in striking long shots: The protagonist is dwarfed by his surroundings, whether the labyrinthine entrance to his apartment building or the steep dirt incline he descends after killing the police officers. The open spaces stifle just as much as the claustrophobic hearing rooms and stairwells do in this season's other absorbing Iranian drama, »
Film: Movie Review: The Hunter
4 January 2012 10:03 PM, PST | avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news »
From the moment The Hunter’s colorful, rock-’n’-roll-stoked opening credits fill the screen, it’s clear that writer-director Rafi Pitts is attempting something a little different from the usual restrained Iranian neo-realism. The Hunter is as deliberate as any other Iranian art-film, building its story incident by incident, quietly following an ex-con (played by Pitts) as he learns that his wife has been killed and his daughter has gone missing in the wake of an election protest. But the movie is frequently bathed in halogen glow and deep shadow, at times looking like Taxi Driver as Pitts drives »
Review: 'The Hunter' A Fantastic, Grim Thriller Targeting Modern Iran
4 January 2012 7:02 AM, PST | The Playlist | See recent The Playlist news »
We've come to expect more than a few things from Iran in recent years, and that goes for its cinema as well (at least the films we actually get to see). The country's most notable movies employ a naturalistic aesthetic, blend fact and fiction, indulge in minimalism and, in that sense, "The Hunter" is a pretty large anomaly. Rafi Pitts's fourth narrative shares genes not with Abbas Kiarostami, but with the nonexistent birth child of Michael Haneke and Nuri Bilge Ceylan -- it's a quiet and patient thriller, complete with an eye for the country's terrain and how its nasty urban dwellings, cold environment, and abominable social/political climate affect its inhabitants. Like the Turkish auteur, there are small moments of truth that touch deeply, and similar to our Austrian grandfather, there are strategic, alarming bursts of violence sprinkled throughout. In short, "The Hunter" is the first must-see of »
2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2007 | 2006
7 items from 2012
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