"A lesson in Cinema "The Wind Will Carry Us"" "How to find the road?" "The road and childhood I don't know, there are two kinds of roads." "One belongs to childhood." "If we believe that a part of us is formed during our childhood, my definition of that road is not a great thoroughfare, it's not a motorway." "That's fine for today, but, for me, the road is still the road of my childhood." "I never went on a motorway when I was a child." "Roads were like this one." "It's fairly easy to appreciate a "raison d'être" for these roads." "You can tell, people were tired, they couldn't climb the steep inclines, so they walked in zigzags." "The first one to do it lays down an invisible trail for those who follow." "Like someone walking through snow." "Others follow." "It becomes a real composition." "Man's path finding, Man making his way without today's technological know-how." "The road and society" "The straight road, of course, has a simpler meaning." "The straightest road is the quickest one." "But mazes and bends seem to me to represent the essence of our movement, as Orientals, third world people, as if the only way forward is by zigzags." "Either it's our natural way of walking, be it in town or country, or we just don't know how to go straight." "It's as if, on our way to our goal, zigzags make us feel safe." "Rounding bends makes us feel safe." "So, the straight road, so strongly recommended in our poetry and philosophy doesn't seem to work in reality." ""Drive my friends to the house"." " Did he tell you why we're here?" " Yes." "But don't tell anyone." " O.K." " Well done." "If they ask you, say we're looking for treasure." "Good idea." "If anyone asks, we're just treasure hunting." "So, if I say to you:" " "What are they doing here?"" " Treasure hunting!" "We might have problems." "No, we won't." "The road and the film" "One thing I often try to do in my films is to keep in mind my first impressions of a new region." "My first meetings with the people of the region." "I try to remember what happened on the day I arrived" "in a new village." "How did people react?" "How did I see them?" "Familiarity is not a good thing, when you get to know a region, you get used to it." "I worked there for six months, I knew it like my own back yard, but I had to recapture my first impressions." "The way I saw the people and the way they saw me." "I'll ask." "Ask that one." "Ask her." "Good morning, Madam." "Good morning, I am honoured." "How do we get to Siah Dareh?" "Turn left at the fork, it's 200 meters further on." "Thank you." "Goodbye." "The mourning rituals with the traditional self-mutilation of the face only exist in two regions of Iran." "In Lorestan and Kurdistan." "I went to Kurdistan first." "I found this remote village and I started to work." "I would say, in a film, finding the location is one of the" "most important parts of the Director's job." "The location is as important as the characters in a film." "It's the location that makes the film credible." "These roads were trails that I had driven down 2 years before filming." "And naturally, with the help of my memory, my notebook and my little camera, I tried to relive my first meeting with the region and the inhabitants." "How to live in the village?" "The village and the stranger lt's important to remember the first time, the first meeting." "It's very difficult to remember how you saw an old friend for the first time when you've known them for years." "It's the same here, he's a stranger, he doesn't know the layout of the place." "A guide shows him the way to his destination." "But, of course, he will always be watching, observing the things and the people around him." "That's the difference between him and the child." "The child knows the area, he doesn't know it at all." "So he looks at all the doors and windows, the people and the streets." "Because it's all new." "It's normal for the two women on the roof to wonder who the stranger is." "Here, the child introduces him to his mother." "That was important, the proof that the character is not being used to represent the word "stranger"" "in an unknown town." "In each detail of the structure of the film, he must be seen to be a stranger." "We have to see their two different cultures and two totally different goals." "I think your mother is wrong." "Small things can be good, you're small, but you're good." "I'll grow." "The house won't." "You feel his foreignness again there." "The shadows of the people on the walls are watching him while they work." "They wonder what he's doing there." "They're always surprised to come across the stranger." "Because of the shape of his glasses, or his clothes, or because he just hangs around..." "The village and women" "That's the real face of the peasant women" "of the region." "In fact, I never saw their faces, they were always on the move, hidden under their huge loads." "It's true that women work all day, are waitresses in the evening, and all do the same 3rd job at night..." "The village and the film I remember on the first location scout, asking people questions, but they never stood still to answer." "They'd keep on walking and I'd have to walk with them if I wanted an answer." "Then I understood, it was like a labour camp there." "Nobody was forcing them, but life was threatening them." "They didn't have much time before the winter, they were like ants, stocking up." "No time to stop and talk." "Their time was limited, as it says in the dialogue." "They spend the winter months around the stove, then go back to work." "It was the work season during filming." "I put people there for the critics and people who would see the film." "In fact, I never saw anyone sitting down in the village." "I thought people would say I was lazy or couldn't' afford the extras!" "I begged them to sit still one minute, it wasn't easy for a second take." "Nobody wanted to keep still." "In fact, we do reconstitute," "Cinema limits us by imposing the devices of the medium." "If we didn't use them, nobody would believe the film." "Here, nobody wanted to sit still at all, as they do in the film." "They were all working." "We couldn't force them to take part in the film." "How to reconcile Cinema and reality?" "The apple" "This apple seems to slide all by itself into the boy's hands." "As it says, such luck does not come to he who sleeps, the apple is reserved for he who is awake." "Of course, we gave nature a lot of help." "It took a whole day's cementing to get the balcony's slope right." "The apple wasn't to go in a straight line, it had to follow routes like we ourselves take." "Faced with an obstacle, it tries another route." "Persian poetry has defined such movement, as a stream running through a field." "Water never runs in a straight line." "The essence of its movement is the obstacle, when the flow is hindered, movement occurs." "The meandering and ebbing that make a stream beautiful happen when it meets obstacles." "That's what we wanted with the apple." "A straight line would have been easy, but untrue." "The apple follows the same movement as man and it is the boy's share." "We worked hard on that shot." "You can see, in the "making-of" film, how long we actually spent on that trajectory." "I'd like to tell you something." "I heard someone behind me on the shoot say:" ""This isn't a film, this is a joke!"" "He'd worked with teams who got 40 or 50 shots in the can a day, and here we were, spending ages and ages on an apple sliding the right way." "He thought it was a joke, he didn't think it was Cinema." "There are details, in life, that are trivial and banal." "When Cinema puts them within a framework so that they attract our attention, they take on a whole new worth." "That's the thing with frames, they are essential in the Art of photography." "Ordinary things, when they are put respectfully into a specific frame encourage a different perception." "They find the right space." "With Cinema, it is even more so, with the spectator sitting in the dark." "With his or her own perception and anticipation, they are willing to concentrate on the most ordinary things." "That's how an ordinary little apple can... justify their stop, their conversation, introduce another character, forge a new relationship, show a new culture, an open house..." "Apparently unimportant things which all have their own meanings." "The tea house" "We're dealing with the logical unfolding of the story." "It's morning." "The group has spent the night there." "One feels the necessity for a form of communication." "How to create the dialogue?" "Sometimes, walking through a park, one naturally talks about the weather." "That happens when people are in the same situation, they start by talking about the weather." "But this is different, the scene is totally false." "It's not artificial, but it's a device because you don't get tea houses in this kind of village." "I put it in to accommodate communication between them." "They've got nothing else to do, but they are not used to having tea in a tea house." "They go home from work for their glass of tea." "Cinema imposes these devices on us." "You can try to avoid them, but they persist." "In some ways, it's a kind of cheating, for example, the tea house." "I painted the walls myself, using original drawings as a model." "We didn't find anyone there to play the old woman." "Everyone was working." "She comes from a village near Kermanshah." "In other villages, I had always found the villagers wanted to participate in the film." "But here, they work so hard, they had no time or inclination to be filmed." "We had to go to a village near the large town of Kermanshah to find a woman for the role." "But she actually caused a lot of problems." "After two days she was fed up." "She said: "l don't want to act," ""let my daughter carry on, she wants to do it."" "It was very difficult to persuade her that she had to finish the film." "We couldn't replace her." "Different events occur on different films, but they are not just personal anecdotes, they are linked to the local culture." "What?" "You have parents, don't you?" "Who served your father his tea?" "My mother, of course." "So why do you say that?" "All women are waitresses." "They have three jobs." "During the day, they work, they serve in the evening and all do the same 3rd job at night." "Except for your mother." "When I gave them the dialogues, I didn't think they would get the meaning." "But when she had finished her lines, about the 3rd job, she went over to a corner and started to laugh." "She covered her face with her yashmak first." "She knew all about that 3rd job herself." "When we finished filming, the discussion started in earnest." "We tend to think that feminism is restricted to progressive, advanced societies." "That it only has a place in highly developed countries." "But if you scratch the surface, you see that relations between the sexes follow the same patterns the world over." "Women are capable of talking about themselves." "Sometimes they are allowed and sometimes not." "But here, it was a real discussion." "Don't men have a 3rd job?" "is it only women?" "Why?" "If a man doesn't do his 3rd job, he is dishonoured." "The 3rd job is as heavy as a mountain on his shoulders." "It's difficult, it's not as easy as you think." "Am I wrong?" "The dialogue was supposed to happen on film." "But when we'd finished, they started the subject back up in their own language, which is more animated, warmer and more real than ours." "The photo" "It's normal, they have their intimacy" "and they want to preserve it." "They hate having their photo taken." "We ask them to act in a film, but taking their photo is very different." "That can happen anywhere in the world, in Africa, people would pose in front of our cameras." "But others forbade us to photograph them." "It depends on the person and their personality, it's nothing to do with Cinema, really." "I've seen it on film shoots, a person's disposition, their personality, counts a great deal." "No photos!" " Was I wrong to give it back?" " l'll put it away." "I said no photos." "It's normal. I'd be the same." "You and I hadn't agreed on that camera, it was unexpected." "I don't like being in front of a camera myself." "I say the same as her when someone points a camera at me." "I said : "Please don't"" "but you filmed me anyway!" "We all have our own thing... I feel best behind a camera, not in front of one, I don't feel natural or safe in front of a camera." "I am only myself when..." "The village" "Chance is a wonderful thing, so I don't change a place too much because it would become a studio set." "I do use decors, we modified the stairs a little, painted the walls, rebuilt the bridge." "But the advantage of a natural set is that you can't change it too much." "That labyrinth already existed." "I find this house so strange, with the room in the corner." "It's difficult to access, the man has difficulty." "Obviously the house was built when he was younger." "When he had no problem going up the step to get into the room." "Today, he has a problem with that step." "But it's his house, he's this woman's son." "I change or modify as little as possible when I work." "I paint things and I clean up." "The lower level here was where the animals lived, the cows and sheep." "It was full of flies and mosquitoes." "We spent a fortune on disinfectant and insecticides." "We had to really clean it up before we could stand to work there." "I don't think it's a film about poverty." "That's not the subject." "I can't bear films where the poverty is so overwhelming that it blots out the real subject." "In any case, I find too much poverty hard to stomach." "We did everything possible to make the images beautiful" "and pleasant to look at." "The forest I kept telling the team to forget the rails for the travelling shots, the lighting gear, the machinery." "Nobody listened to me." "They probably thought I just wanted to save money, so they bought everything anyway." "They packed the lighting gear back up on the first day." "We left the dolly out for travelling shots, but the guys who were there to work it started to get depressed." "The whole team was there to set up the travelling shots, they had nothing to do..." "This part of the shot is just a simple pan." "It looks more real to me." "Let's rewind to see... I let them set the dolly up to cheer them up a bit and motivate them." "So we used it for the first part of the shot." "But I don't really like it." "I suffer every time I see the trees parading through my shot like that." "In the other part, it's the same trees, but they don't make me suffer!" "The travelling shot was to cheer them up and encourage the team to stay motivated." "I used the shot, but it gives me no satisfaction." "The camera follows its natural movement, that is to say, we don't see it moving." "Then, suddenly, the forest starts to move, you lose the impression of trees planted in the ground." "They start walking and the shot is painful for me to watch, I don't like it." "I regret not using a fixed camera for that shot." "They could have done it their way too." "In the other part of the shot, the movement is more credible." "It's more in harmony with the two living beings, the scale of the trees is right." "They are rooted in the ground, not walking, like the people." "But in the other part, the men and the trees both start walking." "It's a farce!" "This seems more natural, you see the roots going down into the ground." "I sometimes wonder whether the technology, designed to make Cinema better, doesn't make it worse, in some ways." "I truly hope I never have to use any of the huge possibilities that are available to filmmakers today." "One camera, two or three lenses and a tripod are ample for..." "The cockerel" "There's some direction involved here to hold the image and use one shot, instead of three." "The cockerel?" "I don't know if we arranged that, if someone pushed it or not, anyway, it was very welcome." "We thought about the role of time." "At a certain point, the car is no longer in the frame." "Whereas we needed to have a link between the village and the road." "The frame stays empty when the car drives off." "The dust holds our attention to some extent." "Then the herd passing by helps to claim our attention" "the time it takes to notice in which direction the car is going." "So, as soon as the herd is out of the frame, the car comes back in." "And the cockerel... it's as if he comes into the frame as a special guest and helps to..." "Animals help to make everything... the staging of the scene and the atmosphere more natural." "They help to make us forget the men and women and above all, the film crew." "Their presence is such that even with no one on the screen, we feel the presence of hundreds of people." "When a bird appears, its indifference... or a sheep, or another element that pays absolutely no attention to the crew, the scene will play out much more naturally." "So, it's difficult to cut it out." "I would say the best actor here is the cockerel." "It's wondering, where should it go?" "Where shouldn't it go?" "It acts better than our actor." "In any case, it helps the acting seem more spontaneous, more real." "Life" "Going by the films I see," "Cinema today seems artificial, it looks like fabrication." "As if we were killing life in order to reassemble it." "We turn life into a kind of canned product and call it Cinema." "Cinema is canned life." "Such intimate and important things happen in life, they seem to me to be outside of all control." "Especially outside of a Director's control." "It is life that imposes itself on Cinema." "We have to show life, not artificial life." "We should restore life rather than destroy it." ""Canned life" Cinema, fabricated Cinema is very fine work." "There's nothing wrong with canned goods, but they are what they are." "How to find the links?" "Seeing and believing" "You recognize those films in the sound and in the lighting." "I believe, unfortunately, that Cinema, when it shows too much, ends up by showing nothing." "The spectator is impoverished after such a film." "People usually question in order to understand something." "People say: "l don't understand the end of your film."" "I know why they don't understand, because as soon as we question, we feel that we haven't understood." "We should ask questions, not answer them." "Why want to understand everything?" "Let's just leave the questions." "What happens if we don't understand?" "I enjoy, when I'm reading, coming across a blank page." "It often happens in Iranian printing, you get a blank page in a book." "I am curious to know the unknown events lost between two printed pages." "I enjoy trying to guess what could have happened on that page." "It's about believing in things you haven't seen." "Believing without seeing." "Through a window, we guess the family goings-on inside." "Our only help is the window, every spectator has his or her own imagination." "We should trust the spectator's intelligence and ability to discover by himself." "We should not show everything at all costs." "I think that the value of Cinema increases when it doesn't show it all." "There is a kind of Cinema that exists as active dissension against the current tendency to show and explain everything." "I have seen open heart surgery, which is never shown in a film." "It is obviously much too intimate and private." "Wanting to show everything becomes a kind of pornography." "You see more when you use your imagination, your vision is fuller, more open." "Everyone has a different vision of the same thing." "I give signs, pointing the way to a different image for each spectator." "Guess!" "I'll give you signs, you guess the rest." "The film crew is there without being visible." "I can't decide for you." "Yes, you can." "Only God can decide." "Who plans the film shoot?" "I can't strangle it!" "What do I do?" "Nobody told you to strangle it." "What then?" "How much longer do we have to stay?" "What if it never happens?" "What if it does?" "You're in contact either with God or the Angel of death." "Who are you in contact with?" "The spectator should respect himself enough to remember how to use his imagination." "He can appreciate so much more through his imagination." "There is a multitude of possibilities." "In my opinion, this Cinema is not parsimonious, on the contrary, it is generous towards the spectator, it respects him." "It gives him credit for being capable of guessing that there is someone in the grave." "Because of the song he's singing, the spectator guesses that he's in love." "Because of what he says we discover... that he's an unskilled labourer." "Through the dialogue we feel the logic of the peasant faced with the city-dweller." "Hello." "Why did you stop singing?" "You sing well." "Carry on!" "I don't dare to any more." "Why not?" "You're down there, I'm up here." "I can't see your eyes." "I can't see you at all." "I can see you." "Secrets and knowledge" "Believe me, I don't like this part very much." "When someone tells a secret, it doesn't help," "the film needs ambiguity." "Didn't you come for the ceremony?" "They denounced us!" "The crew was joking with the boy." "We told him we'd come for treasure, we didn't want them to know why we were here." "His family lives in the village and it's a small village." "He believed us, but then we told him the secret." "And the film takes on social connotations that I don't like very much." "When someone who has seen the film says to me:" ""You were hard!"" "I'm not at all pleased." "I don't intend to be hard, that's not my job." "I want to get to reality through the circumstances." "There's no point in judging human relations." "The complexities of malelfemale relations are as old as time." "You can't simplify or judge." "I've forgotten the dialogue, but he's talking of his mother." "During the ceremony, they scar their faces." "The first scratch was for my aunt's death." "My poor mother did that to prove her love to my father." "The second was for my father's boss at the factory." "One of his cousins had died." "It was so my father wouldn't loose his job, my mother wailed and scratched her face for him." "It drove me mad." "There was a lot of competition at the factory, who would lose their job?" "The basic necessity of working, you see?" "It's much too complex to be clear cut, at one glance, to give the spectator the key to the enigma." "Some things need to be a bit concealed, to remain as questions, like in a relationship... some things are inside you." "It was interesting, one day, a schoolteacher came a very long way to see me, a Cinema enthusiast." "I found him a role the very same day." "He really was on crutches, so I offered him the schoolteacher role." "He accepted, but it was hard going, he couldn't act at all." "I understood why later... lt took us hours for him to get it right and he wanted to justify himself so he told us his secret." "He had taken speech and diction lessons for three months!" "That was what was spoiling everything, the art of diction!" "But the fact is, when we express ourselves, sometimes it's concise and sometimes we ramble on." "Relationships don't depend on performance." "What's the point of diction?" "For monologues and, of course, for theatre." "For this kind of intimate Cinema we need real exchanges." "Like these two, the child knows nothing about diction." "He mumbles the ends of his words, like I do..." "The couple" "I like the look in his eyes, it's the look of a curious man, I'd even say, deceitful, on the look out for every possible link." "The only thing I'm sure of is that there is a link between them." "This girl, who we just glimpse, when we meet her again later, her cave is like the grave her man is digging." "As if they both lived in semi-darkness, but there is hope, there is light." "In the girl's darkness, the light is the milk that is then taken into the man's darkness." "She bought me some milk." "Do you want some?" "No thank you, she brought it for you." "There's a kind of subterranean relationship between them, we don't see the logic of it in the darkness, we're not supposed to." "Come in." "Can you milk the cow for me?" "Wait, I'll do it." "It's dark, how can you milk in here?" "I'm used to it, I work here." "You'll get used to it if you stay." "I'll be gone before then." "We've got a gas lamp, there's no electricity." ""lf you come to me"" "What?" ""bring a lamp, my beloved" ""and a window, through which 0"l will watch the happy crowd in the street."" "There is something here that I would like to mention." "The complex relationship between this woman and her man." "It is not said in words, there is no dialogue, but we understand completely that this woman is not the same as when we last saw her." "We understand that she isn't just a waitress." "This scene justifies her saying:" ""Women work all day, serve all evening and..."" "We aren't privy to their relationship," "it's their private life." "But we understand the nature of it." "There's just the one story, which never repeats itself." "We guess that there is some problem, like we all have," "because they don't talk openly about it." "We have to intuit for ourselves." "I'm very pleased with it." "The mirror" "For each of my films, there is one shot that I think about all the time, at night, when I'm falling asleep." "I'm always wondering when I'll be able to film it." "In this film, it's this shot." "I thought about it for a year, before filming it." "It turned out to be the try-out we filmed with him." "I remember the house and the cameraman who played the woman's role, or maybe it was me..." "We did the dialogue and we tried to see if we could integrate two scenes into one." "It's one of these delightful shots that I love so much, I had to film it." "That's why he's standing on a stool." "There's no house on the side, we built a high, narrow surface." "The cameraman is up there too." "There is no house there." "I'd already experimented in "The Report" in 1978, the man was brushing his hair in front of the mirror and you see his family in the background." "But that wasn't enough for me, I wanted to do it again, to see if it would work..." "How to understand death?" "Spring and the mating season" "This scene..." "they didn't have a contract to be filmed in that position!" "But whenever there was a scene with them, every time there was a herd, one of them would try to mount another!" "It was spring." "It was interesting, because we all lived in towns, and it wasn't really normal practice for us." "But the children and adolescents who take care of the cattle were never surprised by this irregular behaviour." "We alone were shocked, even ashamed sometimes, of having seen it." "But it happened so often that it's in the film, the cattle, the sheep, the spring and the sap rising." "The theme of spring contrasts with death, which is the subject of the film, the choice is deliberate." "How can one think of life without taking the threat of death seriously?" "Maybe you don't feel it, but the threat is out there." "That's why I chose spring to have the contrast with death." "Life and Death lt's all in the details." "If you look carefully, you see everything in opposition to death." "The crew eating strawberries, the relation to the town," "the grass sprouting green, the trees in the graveyard." "Everything is a sign of life." "But, at the same time, life without opposition, life without the discord of death has no meaning." "To every thing, there is a season." "This is the dried up tree in the graveyard." "Compared to the other trees, its time is up." "It's the oldest one, the biggest one, it has dried up, naturally." "The woman with the washing has a baby in a crib and a swollen belly." "It's a sign." "Before death comes, she will give birth." "Death is beautiful because we don't believe in it." "We think it only happens to other people." "That is an enormous help in life." "From experience, we have all witnessed the death of others, over and over, but never our own." "In any case, this bone... makes death more substantial, even though we never believe we will die." "I've witnessed death around me, but never my own." "On the 1 1 th September, when the first plane went through the first window where someone was doing an important business deal, did he know he was dead?" "Nobody can answer that question." "Believing in death is hard, we talk about it, we read poems about it, but we don't believe in it." "The bone and the river" "Bahman Ghobadi, my Kurdish assistant was down in the grave." "The idea of something springing up like an explosion, seemed beautiful to me." "Something held deep down in the bowels of the earth surging up to free itself." "There's the same energy at the end, as the water takes it." "Subtitles:" "Roly Aknin-Dowling" "Subtitling by TVS" " TlTRA film"