Sometimes I sit through excruciatingly painful boring movies so that you don’t have too. To be totally honest I will ‘fess up that I don’t do this deliberately, but it’s just the downside of trying to want to push the envelope with my viewing choices.
The blurb from Miami International Film Fest Schedule ‘a portrait of life’s difficulties in modern day Iran’ intrigued me sufficiently, but once the opening credits rolled I very quickly sort of lost it. I was never ever sure if it was meant to be a documentary on these 3 migrant workers desolate lives, or a very sad narrative where nothing much happened at all. It wasn’t helped by the fact that every single shot was from a fixed camera, often in the distance, and that stayed on that one scene for an excessively long time. The snail-like pace of all the (in)action was unendurable
The men were so poor that they were forced to make makeshift homes in disused sections of pipe in the Oil Refinery (I think) they worked. But none of the facts were clear at all in this totally bizarre movie, except that one of the men’s job was unblocking the hole-in-the-floor toilets. The director found it necessary to show him doing this on three different occasions. It was totally disgusting esp. when his pump breaks down, and I know that this should not be the one element that sticks in your memory afterwards, but trust me it does. It gave rise to a number of very in-appropiate puns : a sh-t movie about sh-t, or A Kurd with Some T … , well you get the drift.
Evidently it won an Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, somehow I cannot see it repeating that here.
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