3 Faces

Jafar Panahi is a legendary Iranian director who has been banned from making films for 20 years. Despite this, he continues to create and express himself as an artist. Watching a new film by Panahi is incredibly gratifying because he is a savvy rebel who laughs in the face of his sentence and produces fascinating cinematic works. Panahi has mastered the art form of filmmaking with startling finesse, and he manipulates and evolves it in unique and exciting ways.

His latest film, "3 Faces", is a tragic story about the strength of women. It suggests that misogyny still exists in Iran. The film is enigmatic and enlightening.

This is a brilliant film. Beautiful, poignant, unpredictable, quite harsh yet with a few sparks of humour. The actors (mostly playing themselves) and the screenplay are amazing. It does require a lot of attention and analysis, as it covers several social issues (artists' and women's rights mainly) with subtle metaphors and a peculiar visual "language". Some moments were a bit too cryptic for me, probably due to a cultural gap. You have to respect Jafar Pahani for managing to create such a rich and multi-layered visual story under such hard conditions and constraints. I highly recommend "Se rokh".

Panahi's preference of non-professional performers contribute a great reality atmospehere in fictitous story. Panahi takes us to Azerbaijani-Turk coast of Iran and narrates a real view of desires, demands, expactations, hope and lack of opportunities in provincial life within colourful and peculiar culture of Iran.

Story: An Iranian girl wants to be an actress & gets a famous Iranian actress to investigate her desire. A relatively tame presentation of the issue. I've seen many movies on what young females, wherever they may be (including unlikely Western democracies), face to maintain family honor though obedience & marriage, e.g. coercion, shaming, disowning, punishment, imprisonment, & death. "A women who wants to study dishonors her family." "God blesses families with a son." "Marriage would make her forget about studies." Others to watch: "Difret", "A Suitable Girl", "What Will People Say", "He Named Me Malala".

To the pantheon of road movies we can add Jafar Panahi's "Se rokh" ("3 Faces" in English), about an actress traveling across the country. Panahi plays himself in the movie. It's amazing that he managed to make the movie, as he's currently banned from making movies, due to depicting things that Iran's government finds inappropriate (such as "Offside", in which women try to attend a soccer game but get kept out of the stadium due to the sight of men in shorts).

Watching this movie, I got the feeling that life in Iran's hinterlands must be a miserable existence. It's not a great movie, but worth seeing as a look at people whom we don't often see.