Massoud Bakhshi: “Media manipulate individuals everywhere”

 

Forgiveness, justice and the power of TV are being “dissected” in an austere manner in the second feature film by Iranian director Massoud Bakhshi, Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness.

Having won the award of best foreign language film at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, it is being screened at Greek cinemas since June 17. In conversation with the director.

Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness, your second feature film, primarily touches on the issues of forgiveness, justice and love through the “encounter” of two women of different class backgrounds, where the roles of the victim and the perpetrator alternate.

Is it through forgiveness that justice may indeed be attributed and societal cohesion maintained, to your mind? Or is the issue more complicated?

I think it is more complicated. Justice is a very relative concept, and it all depends from which side, which angle you look at the case.

But, as you noticed correctly, the main question here is forgiveness, which makes everything more complex and more interesting.

While everything is set up to achieve this forgiveness and give a lesson to the audience, you can see that it is not easy to renounce the vengeance.

Of course, to me, this is more a conceptual film than a social drama, even if I don’t mind that spectators or critics see it as a social drama.

Your film also highlights in an almost documentary way the infuriating influence that TV, and especially the so-called “reality shows”, may exert on people’s everyday life and -often- death.

What does the popularity of such shows reveal about the Iranian society?

Reality shows is a modern phenomenon just like the television itself, it is the result of the famous “ethical black hole” in modern aesthetics. Television and social media produce a new system of values in which everything appears more or less kitsch.  

And from America to Africa, from India to Saudi Arabia, these shows are produced and aired following some very similar formulas.

The film also portrays a society in which the gap between the poor and the rich is increasing. This is also universal: a rich minority takes everything and the majority of the world’s inhabitants struggles to have a minimum.

Media manipulate individuals everywhere, and even the good intentions don’t justify this kitsch system.

Sadaf Asgari

Yalda marks your second collaboration with experienced Iranian actress Behnaz Jafari and the first with Sadaf Asgari who impersonate the characters of Mona and Maryam, respectively. How has it been working with both of them?

I asked each one of them to find a role model for their characters in the real life.

Sadaf, the lead actress, comes from a very popular district of Tehran and had a hard life, she used to know these stories. I sent her to courts to attend the process of crime cases and to see how it goes.

For Behnaz, the actress impersonating Mona, it was a bit different She told me about one of her friends, an educated daughter who seriously opposed her rich father’s second marriage with a young wife.

They both incorporated elements of reality into their performances.

Moral dilemmas are often fictionally explored in Iranian films, to the point that one might describe Iranian cinema as a study on moral dilemmas. How do you interpret the recurring presence of such concerns?

I think it’s partly because Iranian society is struggling to form its own modernity and at the same time tends to keep traditional values. This struggle was intensified with 1979 revolution and 8 years of war -called “sacred defense”- against Iraq (1980-88).

In this struggle, crisis, contradictions and complexes are inevitable. They appear not only in different aspects of individuals’ life, but also, in larger scales, in the whole society.

Nowadays, in a materialistic world where neoliberalism reigns everywhere, a society like ours tries to differentiate itself, and moral dilemmas are not only personal issues.

Behnaz Jafari

On June 18 Iranians headed to the polls to elect a successor to the outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, considered to be a moderate reformist.

How would you describe the political climate at the moment in the country? Do you estimate that there may be any substantial change through the electoral process?

I am not probably the right person to answer this question as I don’t know about politics, simply because I don’t like it!

What I know is that my country is in a constant change, and having its very ancient history in mind, one can notice that this evolution has been fast and intense in the last century.

I think that the only thing that an artist can do in the same situation is to continue to create, and to keep the hope’s flame alive.

Regardless of the validity of the official data, Iran is among the countries that have been worst affected by the ongoing pandemic on a global level.

What about the prospects of Iranian film production in such unpredictable and unstable times?

Iranian filmmakers were active even under the pandemic. Many series are produced here, but also independent, low budget and marginal films.

The digital element has revolutionized everything in cinema, even if the distribution and lack of film theaters, besides the increasing costs of the production, are still big issues for this cinema.

Massoud Bakhshi’s feature film Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness is screened at Greek cinemas from June 17 distributed by Weird Wave.