Films from Lebanon and Iran shine at Vancouver International Film Festival

While Vancouver is 10,000 miles away from most Middle Eastern capitals, its growing diaspora communities are reflected in this year's programming at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF).

Rather topically, most of the films from the MENA this year are from Iran (there are over 50,000 Farsi speakers in the greater Vancouver area) and Lebanon (the city is home to over 6,000 Lebanese), and include an array of documentary, short and feature films.

Spotlight on Lebanon's trauma 

As Lebanon once again reels from Israeli bombardment, the world premiere of Karen Abou Jaoudeh’s 7-minute short, Gate 3 to 14, documents the effects of the August 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut as filmmakers take part in a search and rescue effort. 

The film's reflection on the four-year-old trauma the city is still recovering from recalls its current spiral into yet another nightmare of destruction.

“What do you feel?” asks the director of a friend in the first few frames. “I feel numb,” she replies as they drive through apocalyptic scenes and the detritus of the explosion.

“If someone were to visit here for the first time,” she says, “they would say, ‘What a fantastic set for a movie.’ But this is just the raw reality we live in. We tell jokes to keep on going — like our parents after the civil war — we will adapt and continue as if nothing happened.”

In fact, the entire film feels spookily prescient, with lines like, “I don’t think there’s a bigger crime scene than what’s around us,” and “The entire country is a crime scene.” Or “From Palestine to Syria to Lebanon — they don’t let anyone live in peace. They are kicking us out of our lands.”

“What I’m thinking about the most are the mothers,” says one of the filmmakers, evoking not only the Lebanese tragedy but also that in Gaza: “the mothers of the kids whose remains we are digging up.”

If the Sun Drowned into an Ocean of Clouds (and a Wave of Darkness spread over the world) feels equally prescient. But this charming short about the plight of a security guard in Beirut, whose job consists of trying to keep people out of a new luxury tower development by the sea, also offers some hope for the human spirit.

Evoking a kind of magic neo-realism, the film shows both the beauty and brutality of Lebanon — a country at risk from Israeli warplanes as well as homegrown thugs working for the monied classes, whose towering edifices exclude the poor and what is left of the middle class.

Although the protagonist’s l’homme revolté moment ends badly after he stands up to the villains, the film works well in Vancouver, where locals also complain about gleaming new towers being developed for the wealthy and excluding ordinary citizens.

Capturing life as a woman in Iran 

The human spirit in the midst of oppression is also celebrated in a new documentary by Niloufar Taghizadeh called Googoosh, Made of Fire, about the quintessential Iranian pop icon. Like the nation that forged her, the 74-year-old Googoosh is a survivor.

“Humans carry a power within them. A source of strength. We all have it, even if we don’t know it,” Googoosh says at the beginning of the documentary, which is part fan film and part socio-political history of the last half-century in Iran.

As she recounts the perils of the 1979 revolution that led to her 20 years of house arrest, excellent archival footage shows students smashing images of the Shah and shrouded women holding Kalashnikovs. Googoosh notes, “We Iranians wake up in the morning surrounded by politics.”

And so, Googoosh decided to dedicate her recent farewell tour to the late Mahsa Amini, killed by religious police for not wearing her hijab correctly.

As the opening vamp from Jesus Christ Superstar ushers her on stage to a crowd of diaspora fans in Germany, in an orientalised Lloyd Webber moment, she tells them, “For more than 40 years, these beasts have been killing Mahsas to cause sorrow and suffering,” adding, “From now on, we must stand behind all Mahsas and all women of our country.”

The film movingly juxtaposes images of mid-century Tehran with Googoosh’s exile in the West. Rare footage captures her singing as a young child and playing with Queen Soraya’s dress at the Shah’s palace. This is followed by a story about being forced to have her lyricist rewrite lyrics deemed too political for the palace in pre-revolutionary Iran.

In a telling moment, she reveals that towards the end of her two-decade post-revolutionary virtual house arrest, when she was banned from performing, she tried to catch a ride with a group of young people driving by, blasting her old songs from their stereo. They drove on, oblivious, not recognising their country’s biggest star.

Eventually, she was allowed to embark on an international tour in 2000 with unscrupulous promoters who took all the proceeds, leaving her stranded and alone in Canada.

Now, having re-established her bona fides with a whole new generation, she sings songs written by young composers, including lines like, “My Iran — a torture chamber for the innocent, a country of 80 million hostages.”

'Woman, Life, Freedom' lives on

The death of Mahsa Amini ignited the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement in Iran, sparking a worldwide call for women's rights. This ongoing spirit is evident in Googoosh, Made of Fire, and two other Iranian films showcased at the VIIF. 

One of these films, The Seed of the Sacred Fig Tree, directed by exiled filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, is a political mystery and family drama. It follows an "investigator" for the Iranian government during the early days of the rebellion, who suspects his wife and daughters of being involved.

The second film, My Favourite Cake, co-directed by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeh, tells the story of a 70-year-old widow in Tehran who discovers romance in an unexpected place.

Meanwhile, as Middle Eastern diasporas grow in Canada, a new hybrid form has emerged in a film called Universal Language, set in what VIFF director of programming Curtis Woloschuk calls “a city in the centre of a Venn diagram somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg.”

Recently named this year’s Canadian entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, the film, co-written by Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, and directed by and starring Montreal-based Matthew Rankin, reimagines Winnipeg as a city where only Farsi and French are spoken.

Dream-like and moving, quirky and nostalgic all at once, it stylistically channels both Abbas Kiarostami and Wes Anderson while redefining the meaning of cultural belonging.

The VIIF festival is currently ongoing and will run until October 6th.

Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone and has been writing from and about the MENA since 1992. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient sites and modern culture in Iraq. www.hadaniditmars.com

Follow her on X: @HadaniDitmars