As with Rasoulof's "Iron Island" (2005) and "There is No Evil" (2020), this film features intense, rarely seen backgrounds, and like those films it is heavy with criticism of Iran's government.
Here Rasoulof allegorizes his government as an infirm old man who is sustained by the bitter and needless suffering of his people. The people collectively are suffering because the sea has become increasingly salty, and that leads them to brutal acts of superstition against various weak members of society. Several of the tokens of those brutal acts are drawn together in the second-to-last scene - dark red sandals (recalling an intentional drowning of a man unable to stand up for himself), a virgin sacrificed as a bride to the sea (to appease it and persuade it to be less salty), a stubborn vision of the sea as red rather than blue (for which an artist is blinded by having monkey urine poured into his eyes, and then banished to pointless labor on a barren rock in the midst of the sea). The most important symbol of suffering: the actual tears of the people, collected by the gruff main character and finally used as a kind of libation to the infirm old man.
The film was made on and near Lake Urmia, a saltwater lake in northern Iran that has greatly shrunk (and become harshly saline) due to drought.
One day, Iran will regard Rasoulof as an artistic master-hand of the nation. But not yet, alas.
Here Rasoulof allegorizes his government as an infirm old man who is sustained by the bitter and needless suffering of his people. The people collectively are suffering because the sea has become increasingly salty, and that leads them to brutal acts of superstition against various weak members of society. Several of the tokens of those brutal acts are drawn together in the second-to-last scene - dark red sandals (recalling an intentional drowning of a man unable to stand up for himself), a virgin sacrificed as a bride to the sea (to appease it and persuade it to be less salty), a stubborn vision of the sea as red rather than blue (for which an artist is blinded by having monkey urine poured into his eyes, and then banished to pointless labor on a barren rock in the midst of the sea). The most important symbol of suffering: the actual tears of the people, collected by the gruff main character and finally used as a kind of libation to the infirm old man.
The film was made on and near Lake Urmia, a saltwater lake in northern Iran that has greatly shrunk (and become harshly saline) due to drought.
One day, Iran will regard Rasoulof as an artistic master-hand of the nation. But not yet, alas.