Jumate/Jumate
My first screening was two medium short nonfiction films. This first one was about a dwarf Romanian Gypsy that makes money as a street performer in Barcelona, with the help of a full-grown daughter. It's always interesting to hear a unique life story, but this served as a little vignette, nothing more. The details of her story were a bit hard to follow.
Dolls: A Woman From Damascus
This was a little bit more compelling because it tied an individual woman's plight with greater issues in Iranian society. However, the limitation of its message is due to the film focusing on this one woman's particular story. The 50 or so minute film juxtaposes two stories. First, is a vignette about a young conservative Iranian woman raising two small kids and putting professional ambition aside to be a good housewife. Scenes from her life are alternated with commercials for Fulla, an Iranian Barbie doll, and interviews with the marketers of the popular product reveal the changes made in the clothing and types of Fulla products based on objections from the religious Iranian community.
It's an interesting duality, and if the film had more time to explore more people and parts of Iran, I'm sure I could make a better connection between both subject matters. What I told my friend though, is that these nonfiction and fictional snapshots of societies that are supposed to be so foreign and occasionally 'evil', as in the Axis of.., are illuminating in how human their struggles are and how normal their households seem. I don't need convincing that we all share more commonalities than differences in the world, but it seems like if more of this films reached the mainstream consciousness, there would be no room in our discourse for threatening aggressive military action towards nation's led by belligerent political actors.
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