Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(56) - Iran

Farrok Ghaffari b.1921 Ebrahim Golestan n b.1922 Dariush Mehrjui b.1939 Sohrab Shahid Saless b.1944 

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Forugh Farrokhzad

The Shah of Iran and the ruling elite's modernisation policies provided access to US film and TV companies at the expense of the indigenous film industry. Earlier last century Iran produced an extraordinary range of poets, one of whom, an 18 year old female poet, Forugh Farrokhzad, in 1962 pointed the way for indigenous film-making with a short film, Khaneh Siyah Ast/The House is Black about a colony of lepers, simply filmed in black & white with a poetic commentary written by herself. and produced by writer Ebrahim Golestan (1922-2023) who had his own film studio, a major source of film footage of Iran in the 50s and 60s. “What really set the tone for much of Iranian cinema thereafter was this film's sincerity of tone, its deep humanity and its attempt to move beyond simple description […] Most of the parts were played by real people” (Mark Cousins 314). 

A few years earlier a socially conscious film, realistically and critically set in urban poverty, Jonub-e Shahr/South of the City (1958), made by a young European-educated film-maker, Farrokh Ghaffri (1922-2006), had been banned and the negative mutilated. Golestan made The Treasure of Jinn Valley in the early 70s deemed to be critical of the Shah. He sold his film studio soon after and settled in England.

At the end of the 60s the local film industry which had been producing low-quality melodramas, comedies, and tough guy ('luti') films, delivered a jolt. A well-crafted luti, Qeysar (1969), the second film of  Masoud Kimiai, Qeyser was a major local success with audiences. Kimiai turned the genre on its head by linking the good with Iranian culture and tradition and the bad with its violators (read: encroaching westernisation and secularisation). 

Dariush Mehrjui

At about the same time Dariush Mehrjui (1939 -2023) made Gav/The Cow (1969) about a farmer who loses his livelihood when his cow, which had been producing milk for the whole village, mysteriously dies. It so affects him that he begins embodying the animal in spirit. The film revived the sparse realist style of Ghaffri’s 1958 film enlivened by the originality of the script written by one of Iran's leading contemporary writers. The Cow was funded by the Ministry of Culture which banned it for a year then reversed its decision in light of its positive international reception and critical acclaim at international film festivals. This opened the way for Ministry financial support for a succession of 'art' films including Mehrjui's second film The Postman (1970). These two films caused historical change and are now regarded as the precursors of the Iranian New Wave. 

The popular success of Qeysar, a tough rape-revenge drama, was attributable to Kimiai's radical revision of the 'luti' genre's cultural elements, by the foregrounding of socially marginal characters speaking in the dialect of the streets. As a writer-director Kimiai's innovations in a popular genre also achieved some festival success with films like his seventh, The Deer (1974), which resulted in Kimiai's arrest and was banned for a time after winning Best Actor award at the Tehran Film Festival to his 31st feature, a political crime drama Killing a Traitor (2022), played out “in the spirit of Warner's gangster films.”

After making The Cow Mehrjui worked at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, an organisation, known as Kanun, founded by the Shah's wife Farrah.  

Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) had come from fine arts as a 20 year old to design advertising posters and illustrate children's books. In 1969 he started making short Kunan-funded films. His first film, Bread and the Street, was with a 7 year old boy and an untrained dog which later provided the basis for his breakthrough feature Where is My Friend's House? (1987), the first of a trilogy that screened worldwide. Working with non-professionals Kiarostami described as “being a blueprint for my work” which had advantages and disadvantages but he enjoyed the latter because he learned a lot more by having his pre-conceptions continually challenged by working with non-professionals and children, forming the basis for “an on-going relationship.”

At the same time as these state-controlled developments, Iranian film culture was boosted by a group of foreign-trained film-makers who made films departing from traditional genres introducing greater realism and improved technical standards. Those dissatisfied with opportunities provided by the state formed the New Film Group which produced the second feature by Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944-98), Tabi’at-e bijou / Still Life (1975). Saless had already made more than 20 shorts and a feature A Simple Life (1973) in which the dispassionately observed austere daily life of a 10 year old boy, ignored by his father, is transformed by the death of his mother. In Still Life Saless directs the camera’s gaze on an aging Iranian, the sole attendant of a desolate train station resigned to the loneliness and boredom of the job he has done for 33 years. His wife devotes herself entirely to weaving cloth in their nearby home. Their son has left home to join the army. The stasis in the lives of the couple is abruptly threatened by the unexpected visits of two men to the station and the house. Still Life is a landmark film in Iranian cinema winning the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Sohrab Shahid Saless

Saless left Iran when he was not able to complete his third feature without interference. In Dar gorbat /Far From Home (1976) made in Germany he drew on his own experiences as an immigrant moving from job to job in Vienna. He cited Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai as an important influence in showing how colour can be deployed as if it were black and white, and how one can make a humane film (on the “solitude of man”) about a murderer who trusts no-one in a sick society. He emphasised his on-going commitment to a form of minimalism created in the editing room, that reaches beyond neo-realism in creating a solitary and uncompromising cinematic world that is both original and necessary. He identified a developing theme in his films as “man's fear of himself,” a subject replacing conventional plot. The only external source for a film he said he would consider was an adaptation from Chekhov. 

What was happening in Iran, beginning in the late 60s, was by the mid 80s beginning to be recognised as a remarkable instance of “an indigenous realist movement, somewhat comparable to Italian neorealism' [that] becomes more conscious of the conventions involved in realism, and develops more abstract experiments in form” (David Bordwell 161). “The filmmaker can only raise questions, and it is the audience who can seek the answers” (Kiarostami).

“The realism of Close-Up and Through the Olive Trees is not the transparency to reality sought by Italian neorealism, the illusion of actually being there. Rather, it is the realism declaring its artifice, vividly depicting a reality without letting us forget we're watching a film. Kirostami blends realism and modernism, a representation of life and a reflection on how life is represented on the screen.” (Gilberto Perez 190)

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Don Ranvaud interview with Sohrab Sahib Saless in Framework Spring  1976 

Hamid Naficy, “Iranian Cinema” Oxford History of World Cinema  ed.  Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 1996 

Ehsan Khoshbakht “The Deer”  Cinema Reborn 2022

Nassid Hamid “Near and Far” an interview with Abbas Kiarostami  Sight and Sound  February 1997 

Gilberto Perez  The Eloquent Screen A Rhetoric of Film 2019 pp. 188-197                                                                                                             

 Adrian Martin “Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016):Three Essays 2003,2010,2016 Film Critic :Adrian Martin  

David Bordwell  Poetics of Cinema 200 p.161

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NOTE - Renumbering is still due to take place

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links. 

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

6 (41) - The Soviet Union

6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One

6 (43) - Japan - Part Two

6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura

6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray

6 (46) Asia - India Pt 2- Ghatak, Dutt, Sen, Parallel Cinema

6 (47) Asia - China - Part 1: Mapping Chinese Cinema 

6(47) Asia- China - Part 2: The Shanghai Revival (1947-1949)

6 (48) - Brazil Pt 1- Cinema Novo, dos Santos, Rocha

6 (49) Brazil Pt 2 - de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra

6(50) - Latin America - Argentina

6 (51) - Chile - Allende and Popular Unity

6 (52) - Latin America - Bolivia, Jorge Sanjine

6 (55) - Cuba

A Travel Hint and a recipe - Airline omelettes and a lesson from MIDNIGHT DINER

Kaoru Kobayashi as the chef in Midnight Diner

When travelling, at least when travelling in your old age when you can afford smart hotels with giant buffets, airline lounges, indeed airline travel, my advice is never choose or accept anything which is described as an omelette.

You will find something shaped like an omelette, even coloured like an omelette, basically yellow, but it never tastes like an omelette should - a slightly firm exterior and an interior that is slightly, just on the edge of liquid. 

Omelettes that have gone through the hell of preparation for a buffet or a heated (re-heated?) airline breakfast, taste nothing like that. They are hard and unyielding of any flavour to savour.

The best omelette I have tasted, and I dont profess to have tasted every possible method or combination, was first demonstrated at the end of an episode of Midnight Diner when the chef simply about an ounce of butter into a medium heat frying pan with a flat bottom about eight inches wide and steeply curved sides. When the butter had melted he simply broke two eggs onto the butter and stirred vigorously with a table fork for about twenty seconds before  turning one side over onto the other with a spatula and after about another twenty seconds flipping it over again. Some tiny shade of brown appeared on the ridge. it was ready. 

If you want add cheese, smoked salmon or diced chicken add it just before you use the spatula.

Vale Tony Rayns - a long time great friend

My friend Tony Rayns died a sudden death on Saturday 27 June on his return from Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato. It happened only moments after he got back to his flat in Brixton and had a fall on the stairs within. There has been a huge outpouring of condolences and sympathy for his  family and many people have been in touch with me to say how saddened they are at his passing. He was 78 and had been in poor health for quite a long time and the trip to Bologna had been marred by the onset of some serious gastric pain. I took the photo above of Tony and former Sydney Film Festival Administrator Ross Barnard on Tuesday 23 June after we shared a Chinese dinner, almost certainly the last picture of him. 

I have been reflecting on just what it was about his life and work that was most memorable and likely to be most enduring. In doing so I looked up two pieces I wrote for Senses of Cinema following visits to Vancouver for their film festival. For eighteen years Tony curated a remarkable, indeed quite unique, strand of the festival devoted to East Asian cinema. He had sold the idea to festival director Alan Franey who backed the project to the hilt. I had attended the so-called Dragons and Tigers section several times before I filed a  report in 2000 in Senses of Cinema. By that time I had come to appreciate just what Tony was doing, which was providing a pathway out of Asia to the west.

Twenty six years ago I could write: In the meantime, the only portal of early work to the West is Vancouver which gives special attention to the programming of films particularly from East Asia. That festival is now utterly distinctive from the myriad of other events taking place around the English speaking world. Look back over most years and almost all the major city festivals will seem to circulate each year a selection from the same hundred or so new films that have been launched at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto. Almost all will have been processed through the bureaucracies, networks and other festivals of official European or American independent production.

And so it went for Tony's time. When it was all over I wrote another piece for Senses about how all of the Vancouver programs were presented. "In the 18 years that Tony Rayns programmed the East Asian selection at Vancouver there must have been more than 500 features and maybe that many shorts again screened. Each one of them got a serious introduction. Each filmmaker who managed to scrape together the funds to get there got a Q&A session full of relaxed warm insight and explanation. Everyone spent happy post-screening hours at the groaning tables of the nearby Jade Gardens restaurant, drinking and talking on into the night."

More than anything this period discovering figures, some of whom who would later go on to great international renown, was Tony's extraordinary achievement. He did it by ceaselessly tracking his way round the production centres of Asia. And not just the big studios. Independent producers, film schools, low budget doco makers all got his attention. The tributes on the internet all attest to his doggedness in tracking down films for VIFF. For awhile he also spotted talent for London, Brisbane and Rotterdam, he curated seasons for Sydney and other places but the remit was never the same as it was from Alan Franey.

I was reminded of this when I read Tom Charity's obituary for Tony on Facebook. Tom has kindly agreed to my republishing it here. (As an aside Tom reminds me of Tony's selection of Kim Kyung-mook's Faceless Things which contains the defecatory scene he mentions. It was a feature, the second half of which was a real time exposition of the deed. Kim was in Vancouver for it. Someone said to him "I hear your film is controversial?" "Oh no" said Kim "It's disgusting". At the screening Festival staff walked up and down the line of punters queued up to explain that this film was ...well, they didn't say disgusting. My friend David Bordwell replied "That's why we're standing out in the cold at 11.00 pm at night!" Memorable occasion.)

Tom writes: "Tony invited me to come to Vancouver to serve on the jury for Dragons & Tigers, the Asian programme he curated with such acumen for nearly 20 years. I turned him down a couple of times but relented in 1998. It was a trip that changed my life trajectory, and I wound up moving here in 2004. Tony was a tireless and fearless advocate for a cinema that was transgressive, confrontational, formally adventurous and/or dynamic. A cinema that matched his restless curiosity. He was a lucid, rigorous and insightful critic and he could be very gentle, very kind. But he also had a wicked sense of humour. When he laughed his eyes became slits, his cheeks reddened and his wide shoulders shook, so that he resembled a giant Buddha.

But he could also be impossible and his own worst enemy. If he felt slighted he would hold on to that grudge for years or forever. I was spared this fate but knew others scalded by his contempt for next to nothing.

He enjoyed being naughty I think. I remember him championing a short film in which the director indulged his kink for defacating on his lover. For 99 percent of us it was unwatchable but that’s what Tony liked about it, no doubt.

As everyone acknowledges, Tony largely discovered myriad talents in the late 80s and 90s. The first Bong Joon-ho films to play in N America were his student shorts, at VIFF. Because Tony put in the legwork, travelling across Asia, visiting local festivals and film schools. He had a great eye for artistic potential, but he also had the commitment to back it up and do the work. For this he is a genuine inspiration. He made a difference to so many careers, so many lives, my own very much included."

Vale Great Man...I'll miss you a lot...

In Paris - Underwhelmed by DRY LEAF (Alexandre Koberidze, Georgia/Germany, 2025, 186 minutes)

Dry Leaf comes heavy laden with praise.  It had its World Premiere at Locarno last year and has since screened at Toronto, New York, Busan, London and a host of other places including Sydney where the program note advised us the film was "Shot entirely on an old phone to mesmerising effect"  and that it's "One of the boldest formal experiments in recent cinema, Dry Leaf finds striking beauty in the low-res and lo-fi." Actually I dont think it was so lo-fi. The music was crystal clear and the dubbed dialogue quite distinct. 

Soon it will be at MIFF where there are two screenings scheduled. It is three + hours long. Jessica Kiang in Variety is frequently quoted in program notes saying it is "A pioneering use of old, ephemeral tech to invent new, eternal cinema.”  That's some Andrew Sarris-like phrase-making, but I really hope not. I really hope this does not become a thing although Koberidze has now done it twice.

Call me old-fashioned but peering at pixillating out of focus images for three hours is not my idea of fun. (I found the same lack of fun watching Hong Sang-soo's out of focus opus In Water). Filming a story about a father searching for his apparently estranged daughter in the backblocks of Georgia, where the only clue is that she was taking photographs of football grounds, not coming across a single person who has seen her, ruminating through idle chat with locals and interposing landscape shots that basically abstract themselves did not deliver fulfilment. A sequence where the car is washed is filmed in real time from the vehicle's interior had some abstract fascination but it wasn't often repeated.

But it takes all kinds and the fifty or so punters who came out for the opening evening at Le Grand Action on rue des Ecoles sat through it silently. None walked out early. Many were paused on the footpath outside around 11.00 pm apparently discussing it. 

JESSICA KIANG, VARIETY

The Nordic Film Festival 2026 - Tom Ryan highlights a magnificent Bo Widerberg retrospective and recommends THE LAST RESORT (Maria Sødahl, Denmark, 2025)

 

Bo Widerberg

 

Two highlights from the Nordic Film Festival, sponsored by Hurtigruten and happening across Australia in July-August 2026, courtesy of Palace cinemas.

One is the all-too-brief Bo Widerberg retrospective, remembering the work of a Swedish filmmaker with heart, style and a social conscience. Born in Malmö in 1930, he died of stomach cancer in 1996. The program features three of his best films, hopefully the newly restored versions that screened in the seven-film series at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles last month. Raven’s End (1963, 101 minutes), his second feature, tells the story of an aspiring young writer (played by Widerberg regular Thommy Berggren) aspiring to escape the constraints of the working-class area of Malmö that gives the film its title in Being Bo Widerberg (2025, 105 minutes), the documentary accompanying the retrospective, Widerberg speaks of wanting to imbue his characters with a “realistic life”, and the film’s stylistic similarity to the British “kitchen-sink” melodramas of the time is irresistible.

Elvira Madigan (1967, 91 minutes), Widerberg’s first feature in colour, is probably the film for which he’s best known. A far cry from the gritty realism of Raven's End, it’s a visually elegant romantic drama set around the turn of the 20th century about a couple seeking an escape from their everyday lives in the idyllic Danish countryside. It features the glorious andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 on the soundtrack and stars Berggren and Pia Degermark (pictured). 

 

 

The source is a real-life case, although the documentary about Widerberg excavates yet another link to his personal life, one that the writer-director appears to endorse. Characterising him as – among other things – something of a womaniser, it has him saying of his intentions in making the film, “I wanted to show how difficult it could be to be in love with the wrong person.”

Also based on a real-life incident, Ådalen ’31 (1969, 110 minutes) deals with events leading up to and following a workers’ strike in a Swedish sawmill region during which the military forces, summoned by local authorities, opened fire on protestors. Widerberg’s work persistently empathises with the struggle of the disempowered for their rights (see also, for example, 1971’s Joe Hill, starring Berggren in the title role), and, in Being Bo Widerberg, he describes what took place in 1931 as “a turning point in the history of our country”.

 

Widerberg at work

 

For its part, the documentary, written by Jon Asp who also co-directed with Mattias Nohrborg, offers a compelling, warts’n’all portrait of the filmmaker. It begins with home-movie footage of his Malmö childhood, before detailing his career from his early years as a novelist and, in his 1962 essay collection, The Vision in Swedish Film, as an outspoken critic of Ingmar Bergman’s “bourgeois” cinema. We frequently see him on set and in rehearsal, are introduced to his ill-fated struggle to shoot Joe Hill in the US (finished in Sweden) and to the controversy surrounding his final film, All Things Fair (1995). 

Illuminating brush strokes are provided by a wide range of interviews with many of his contemporaries, including Berggren, Jan Troell (who shot three films for him, including Raven’s End), and Degermark, who says of her experience of working with him, not altogether disapprovingly, “He was a great manipulator. And he did it to everyone.” 

Singling him out as a significant figure in the “Swedish New Wave” of the 1960s, numerous present-day dignitaries in the European filmmaking community – among them directors Olivier Assayas, his former partner, Mia Hansen-Løve, Lisa Langseth, Lars Von Trier and Roy Andersson – also offer their views. As do many of his wives and lovers and his four offspring, who were born to different mothers and feature as children in his films. The third eldest, Johan, has made a career as an actor (and plays the lead role in All Things Fair). 

Pervading the film is the sense of Widerberg as a restless, troubled, complicated figure. Often viewed as a “dissident” within the Swedish film industry, he was also admired as a major artist. Bemoaning Widerberg’s struggle to find adequate financing in his later years, producer and longtime collaborator Kalle Boman says of his work, “Why wouldn’t you treasure someone who can do something like that?” 

As noted by several interviewees, he’s also seen as the victim of severe bouts of depression, Berggren speaking with sympathetic dismay of the times when “the barbed wire in his head took over”. But his films speak for themselves, eloquent testimony that he was a creative force to be reckoned with.

The other festival highlight I’ve been able to access is the Danish film, The Last Resort aka Paradis (2025, 100 minutes). The director and co-writer (with Therese Hasman and Eske Troelstrup) is Maria Sødahl, a 60-year-old Norwegian filmmaker who’s probably best known for the 2019 film, Hope, a fictionalisation of her encounter with what, in 2012, was originally diagnosed as a terminal brain cancer. This time, she turns her attention to another real-life crisis: the so-called “migrant problem” afflicting the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa.

Maria Sødahl

As The Last Resort  begins, sixth-form teacher Mikkel (Esben Smed), Louise (Danica Curcic), a chief of section at the Danish Ministry of Health (both pictured below), and their two children, 11-year-old Sille (Sif Lucca Gersby) and six-year-old Ella (Chili Olivia Jemsen), are arriving at a luxurious retreat on the island of Gran Canaria. Before long, however, on a night drive, they run into Ahmad (Aziz Çapkurt), who, lying injured by the side of the road, explains to them that he’s a recent émigré from Afghanistan. The accident occurs offscreen, the camera staying with the couple in the front seat of the car as it happens. 

Ahmad reluctantly allows them to take him to hospital, the difficulties in actually getting him there providing a strong indication that racism rules in this superficially sunny, smiling place. And subsequent events bring the otherwise liberal-thinking and well-meaning Mikkel and Louise face to face with their own complicity in the treatment meted out to “migrants” there. For those on the island, to which boatloads of Africans have made their way across the North Atlantic in search of new lives, the word serves as a euphemism for “refugees” (just as “illegals” has become a way for others elsewhere to refuse the reality of those in need of refuge). 

“It’s a story about us, for us, by us, white, privileged Scandinavians,” Sødahl told Variety earlier this year. “It’s about our self-image as being good human beings, and how this changes when we meet reality close up.” When Ahmad returns, seeking help from the couple, Mikkel does all he thinks he’s able to, offering him money to try to make the problems go away. Louise, on the other hand, with one eye on the family budget and the other on his explanation of why he needs the money, becomes suspicious. This is a full-on collision between two cultures. Ahmad looks at the resort and only sees “a fine place for rich people”; Mikkel and Louise look at him and the nearby refugee camp and see a world they cannot comprehend.

Sødahl limits what we know to what they know. We take up Louise’s doubts about what Ahmad is telling them and, retrospectively, it becomes clear why the accident is kept offscreen. Did it happen at all? Is Ahmad simply scamming these naïve Europeans? Their realisation that they’re part of the problem finds them looking in the mirror and loathing what they see looking back at them, Sødahl’s point-of-view strategy locking us into place alongside them.

“Someone told me it’s like The White Lotus for real,” the writer-director says. “But this is not a documentary… It’s a moral fable… From the beginning, I always saw the island as the world and the resort as Europe, this gated fortress which you can’t enter.”

At the same time as their parents are being forced by the situation to appreciate that the reality around them on the island is something different from what they’d thought it was, Sille and Ella are learning about their place in the confusing adult world around them. Ironically, though, the innocent Sille’s question to her increasingly flustered parents (pictured above) – and to us – seems entirely fitting: “Are you racist?”  

To its credit, Sødahl’s brilliant, uncompromising film allows no simple answer to her question. As it ends, we’re still seeing the world through Mikkel and Louise’s eyes: we finally don’t know who’s responsible for how events have unfolded; we don’t know whether or not Ahmad has been deceiving them, We might have our suspicions, but we don’t even know exactly what’s happened. We don’t know who’s responsible. All we know is that it’s everyone’s problem.  

 

 

 

ABOUT CARLA SIMON - Rod Bishop discovers the work of the Spanish director

Carla Simon

Catalan writer-director Carla Simón was six-years-old when she was orphaned. Both her parents died from needle-transmitted AIDS. 

Simón was forced to leave Barcelona for a small town in northern Catalonia, where she was raised by her uncle and his family. She later studied film in Barcelona and the London Film School. 

Now 39, she has helmed three feature films and eight shorts. 

 

SUMMER 1993 (2017), streaming on Apple TV

Simón’s first feature was an instant success and chosen to represent Spain at the 2018 Academy Awards. 

An autobiographical backstory to her latest feature Romería (2025), Summer 1993 opens with the orphaned six-year-old Frida (played by an astonishing Laia Artigas), being forced to leave Barcelona to live with her uncle Esteve, his wife Marga and their daughter Anna on a self-sufficient Catalonian farm.  

Frida is completely disorientated by the experience. Disorientated by farm life after Barcelona; disorientated by her new family; and particularly disorientated by a developing relationship with the four-year-old Anna. At various times, she puts the younger girl in danger and her new guardians fear they have been lumbered with a dysfunctional child. They wonder if they should get rid of her. 

In her village, rumours surround Frida and she becomes further disoriented when ostracized after bleeding in a playground accident. AIDS is never mentioned, but the blood phobia, the mention of ‘a virus’ and the constant trips to the doctor for blood tests make it clear both her parents have died of AIDS.

Frida’s hard-fought journey to accept her pariah status and come to terms with her new world drives a simple narrative distinguished by its heightened emotional power. Laia Artigas plays Frida brilliantly, with a poker face and wide-eyed observance of all around her, as she constantly figures out her new life. 

For a first feature, Summer 1993 heralds a fully formed filmmaker in confident control over nuance and ellipsis, and blessed with a quite remarkable child actor.

It won the Best First Feature Award at the Berlin Film Festival and three Spanish Goya Awards, including Best New Director and Best Screenplay. It won Best Director in the International Competition at Buenos Aires; and at the Gaudi Awards it garnered Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Editing. The Feroz Awards gave it Best Drama, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay. In all, 30 awards from around the world.

 

 

ALCARRÀS (2022), streaming on Apple TV and Prime

Pedro Almodóvar has called Simón’s second feature a masterpiece: “Behind Alcarràs’s apparent simplicity lies a meticulous director, with hundreds of hours’ worth of work to make this masterpiece look like a documentary.”

It won the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival and was Spain’s entry to the Academy Awards. Followed by Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay at Catalonia’s Gaudi Awards. Alcarrás screened in 60 international film festivals and sold to 35 territories.

The extended Solé family in Catalonia have farmed the same land for generations; land given to them in a verbal promise by a neighbouring family they hid during the Spanish Civil War. The new owner of the land disregards the old verbal agreement and wants them to destroy their fruit trees and install solar panels instead. Faced with rabbit plagues, flooding and price gouging from supermarkets, the family are marooned in a legal quagmire; their way of life doomed. 

The cast are entirely non-professional and Simón carefully fuses the rhythms of everyday farming life with the rhythms of the natural world. Hovering above her beautifully rendered portrait of this humanist family, is the encroachment of a ruthless commercial world wanting to repurpose the land and force protesting farmers into capitulation.

Once again, familial disorientation is Simón’s principal focus and this time a whole extended family are disoriented. Beautifully directed, Alcarrás once again also shows Simón’s extraordinary talent with actors of all ages.  

 

ROMERĺA (2025), current Spanish and Latin American Film Festival

In Competition at Cannes in 2025, Simón’s latest feature upgrades the orphaned six-year-old Frida of Summer 1993 to the now 18-year-old orphan Marina (Llúcia Garcia), who is wanting to apply for a scholarship to study film at a Barcelona university. 

But her name doesn’t appear on her father’s death certificate and she must obtain validation of her birth from a grandparent. Clutching her mother’s diary, she journeys to Vigo in Galicia to meet with her parental family for the first time. She wants her grandfather to sign the appropriate change to his son’s death certificate.

Everything is awkward about her visit, firstly with an uncle and his family; and then with a dressmaker aunt; with young cousins who have been warned not to touch Marina because of her blood; and with contradictory stories and dates about her parents. Finally at an extended family gathering in the sumptuous home of her grandparents, she finds she is anything but welcomed, or wanted.

Marina spends her whole pilgrimage (romeria) in wide-eyed, dazed disorientation, waiting for snippets of information about her parents. She does learn of their heroin addiction, their drug dealing, and her AIDS-positive mother taking Marina to Barcelona as a baby. She is devastated to learn the grandparents kept her AIDS-afflicted father a virtual hostage in their house until his death.

Simón then shifts gears from the naturalism of all her features, and creates a magical realist third act where Marina spectates on the lives of her parents.

Among its other qualities, Romería is a chance to wonder at who our parents really were before we were born. All Simón’s great strengths are in evidence here, her naturalistic acting performances; her ability to make us feel like wide-eyed spectators experiencing the chaotic humanity of extended family life; and the almost subliminal way she makes us feel the ache and pain of a lost family.

Carla Simón’s next project is a flamenco musical.