The Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf is one of the best modern directors, and one of the most precocious of all time, but, even when the repertory houses were in high gear prior to the lockdown, her films were rarely shown. Makhmalbaf made her first feature, “The Apple,” in 1997, at the age of seventeen; her second, “Blackboards,” came out in 2000, and her third, “At Five in the Afternoon,” three years after that. All three display an artistry that is intensely of its time yet at the leading edge, and that is of its place yet reflects an international sensibility—and I’ve recently discovered that all are available to stream. Makhmalbaf expanded, intensified, and refined her artistry from film to film, becoming, by the age of twenty-three, one of the most original directors in the world. (I haven’t seen her fourth film, “Two-Legged Horse,” from 2008, which isn’t streaming anywhere.) She should have joined other rising filmmakers of the time in being considered, now, a modern master. Instead, for reasons unknown to me, she hasn’t made a film in more than a decade (nor left any trace of activity online at all).
Makhmalbaf is the scion of a cinematic dynasty. Her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (who co-wrote the script for “The Apple”), has been a leading Iranian director since the nineteen-eighties; her stepmother, Marziyeh Meshkini, has directed three features, including “The Day I Became a Woman,” from 2000; her younger sister, Hana, has directed two. In effect, the Makhmalbaf family is the Iranian counterpart to the Coppolas—and, remarkably, like Sofia Coppola’s first feature, “The Virgin Suicides,” from 1999, Samira Makhmalbaf’s first feature, “The Apple,” is a story of daughters imprisoned at home. It is also an amazing fusion of documentary and fiction, a dramatization of a real-life event reënacted by the actual people it concerned. (The version that’s currently streaming only has Spanish subtitles.)
The story is centered on a Tehran family, the Naderis, whose elderly patriarch, the father of twelve-year-old twin daughters, is so dogmatically religious that, in order to prevent them from even being glimpsed by males, he refuses to allow them to go out in public at all, ever, from birth onward—not to school, not to play, not to a store. The girls, Zahra and Massoumeh, remain imprisoned at home, locked behind two sets of gates inside the house. They have hardly even learned to speak; their gaits are cramped and awkward. Their mother, who is blind, accepts the patriarchal dictate. But when neighbors realize that there are children in the household, they call the authorities, and the father is forced, under pain of punishment, to let them out. Makhmalbaf lends the story a plainly polyphonic density, blending documentary footage with a true-crime drama, complete with denunciation, investigation, accusation, intervention, and the girls’ experience of liberation. Makhmalbaf films children with a vibrantly unsentimental empathy, capturing their sense of mischievous wonder and surprising autonomy; she also has a keen eye for spontaneous symbolism, such as mirrors and locks and the titular fruit itself, which is prominently featured and suggests dramas of self-consciousness and unnamed temptations and longings.
Makhmalbaf’s second feature, “Blackboards,” is also about oppressed children—it’s a story of violence, deprivation, and terror, set during the Iran-Iraq War, near the border, and centered on Kurdish people who’ve been forced to leave their home town of Halabja after it was subjected to a chemical-weapons attack. The title comes from blackboards that a group of itinerant teachers, in search of work, carry on their backs—and that also serve surprising purposes along the way, including as shields from incoming fire. The teachers can’t get students, which is to say that children in the region are getting no education. One teacher falls in with a group of boys who are “mules,” transporting contraband, at high risk, through the dangerous region; another teacher joins a large group of migrants heading toward the border—and, along the journey, marries a widowed young mother. It’s the teachers who get taught along the way—who find, in the struggle for survival amid the crossfire of two hostile powers, lessons that don’t come from their books. Makhmalbaf herself, in her documentary-rooted cinema, collects and preserves these lessons, and, moreover, lends a highly textured, symbolized identity to them by way of her discerning and composing eye. Her ironic vision doesn’t deride education but affirms it as a basis for recording and transmitting experience—as a model for her own cinema.
Attention to heroic struggles amid horrors—and to the beauty that survivors embrace nonetheless—is heightened and deepened in “At Five in the Afternoon,” one of the great movies of life in wartime; it’s reportedly the first film made in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. In it, Makhmalbaf goes further in her depiction of the urgency of education as a crucial springboard for progress. It’s a tale of two sisters-in-law amid the ruins of Kabul. Noqreh, who’s about twenty, isn’t allowed by her extremely devout father to go to school. With his horse-drawn cart, he brings her instead to a Koranic school, but she sneaks out: she removes her burqa, replaces her slippers with white high-heeled shoes, and heads to a large, outdoor, secular school for girls, where the teacher, a woman, encourages her students to become engineers, teachers, doctors, and even the President of Afghanistan—an idea that Noqreh takes very seriously. Leylomah, her sister-in-law, is married to Noqreh’s brother Akhtar, a truck driver who has vanished; they have an infant, who is starving to death because Leylomah, herself malnourished, can no longer produce milk.
“At Five in the Afternoon” is an appalled, grief-stricken movie filled with characters who’ve endured horrific losses. The film displays a city in ruins, unearths decades of political trauma, depicts ongoing violence, and reveals deep-rooted religious fanaticism—yet Makhmalbaf’s sense of teeming and intimate detail, as well as her passionate vision of the intellectual life, opens dimensions of inner experience as if forging a desperately sought political, material, and social reconstruction of the country. The dialectical element in Makhmalbaf’s first two films bursts out dominantly and proudly in “At Five in the Afternoon,” as in the teacher’s interrogations of her students—and the students’ incisive debate with one another. Challenged by a classmate on the issue of a Muslim woman becoming a head of state, Noqreh cites the example of Benazir Bhutto, in Pakistan. (The pushback that she gets is fascinating.) Encountering a French soldier on patrol, Noqreh engages him in a remarkable, unorthodox political discussion. When a large group of refugees arrives by truck from Pakistan, she speaks with a young man in the group about Bhutto, which gives rise to a warm and promising friendship. He’s a poet, and his recitation (in Dari) of a death-seared poem by Federico García Lorca gives the movie its title, forges their bond, and portends danger.
The filming of “At Five in the Afternoon” on location summoned Makhmalbaf’s most creative inspirations, a visual sensibility that her first two features only sketched, and which, here, bursts forth ecstatically from her surroundings. The film is a modern pictorial masterwork, featuring visions of a vigorous visual energy and a revelatory eye for the vestigial beauties, inspiring exertions, and incidental wonders of a ravaged city struggling toward rebirth. Scenes of the sea of young women’s faces (and, for that matter, of the white-scarved backs of their heads) in school, of the crowd of survivors from Pakistan alighting from trucks, of a burned-out airplane fuselage that serves as a shelter, and of a vast ruined compound where the central family takes refuge have a pointillistic specificity and a monumental power that matches the passionate intimacy of Makhmalbaf’s closeup portraiture. Her trenchant visual composition while on location (she and Ebrahim Ghafori did the cinematography), her documentary-rooted sense of exquisite style, is both a mark of her art and of the times—it connects her cinematic sensibility with those of Wes Anderson and, again, Sofia Coppola, whose documentary views of Tokyo in “Lost in Translation,” made at just about the same time, are similarly distinctive.
Yet Anderson and Coppola have made a batch of major films since then, and I’ve long wondered why Makhmalbaf has not. We served together on a film-festival jury, in 2003, but haven’t been in touch since then; recent attempts to contact her through her family’s film Web site and phone calls to the Makhmalbaf company’s office went unanswered. A piece in Screen Daily from last November describes the tribulations of the Makhmalbafs, who have been living in London since 2011. Her father, who was politically persecuted in Iran, left the country in 2005; Makhmalbaf and her stepmother, who are also in exile, have been denied passports by the British government. And it turns out that, in this year’s push by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to expand the ranks of Oscar voters, one of the eight hundred and nineteen newly invited members is Samira Makhmalbaf. (It’s not clear whether she has actually accepted.) Her voice may count there—but her cinematic voice, one of the most vital of our time, is conspicuous in its absence.
