Cinema Releases - Closed Curtain

They are both on the run: the man with the dog he is not allowed to own because Islamic law deems it to be unclean, and the young woman who took part in an illicit party on the shores of the Caspian Sea. They barricade themselves in a secluded villa with curtained windows and eye each other suspiciously. Why has he shaved his head? How does she know he is being followed by the police? They are now prisoners in a house without a view in the midst of a hostile environment. The voices of police can be heard in the distance, but so too can the calming sound of the sea. One time they look at the night sky full of stars before again withdrawing behind their protective walls.

Are we looking at outlaws, or are the man and the young woman merely phantoms, figments of the imagination of a filmmaker who is no longer allowed to work?

Silver Bear, Best Scipt, Berlin Film Festival 2013

London Film Festival 2013

Kambozia Partovi (b. 1956) graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Art of Tehran University. He started his cinema career as a scriptwriter. He made his first feature, Mahi (The Fish) in 1989. It won the Best Film Award at the Berlinale Generation 14Plus, as well as many other prizes. A few years later, Café Transit (2005) was nominated for the Oscars. He has also written screenplays for other directors, including Atiq Rahimi,  Dariush Mehrjoui,  Massoud Kimiai,  Majid Majidi,  Niki Karimi, as well as Jafar Panahi for The Circle.  Closed Curtain is their first co-directed film.

Director, author and producer, Jafar Panahi (b. 1960) is one of the most influential filmmakers in Iran today. He attended film school after serving in the army during the Iran-Iraq War. While making short films and television documentaries, he contacted Abbas Kiarostami to offer his services in any capacity. Kiarostami became an enthusiastic mentor, helping to get Panahi’s feature debut, The White Balloon, into Cannes, where it became the first Iranian film to win a major prize.

Like many Iranian directors, he began making films about children. The popularity of children as subjects stems in part from the existence of state funding for such films. They also serve to steer filmmakers clear of censorship problems that complicate the filming of any domestic or intimate scenes involving adult women. However, after his first two feature films, Panahi decided to tackle these complications head on by making The Circle, a devastating look at the strictures against women in contemporary Iran. This new tone of social critique continued in the unsettling Crimson Gold.

In the aftermath of the 2009 elections, Panahi was detained, sentenced to six years in prison, but then put under house arrest instead with a 20 year ban on filmmaking. His sentence of six years in prison still stands, but Closed Curtain is the second film that has been made under these restrictions. Since Closed Curtain was shown in Berlin, both the co-director Kambozya Partovi and main actress Maryam Moghadam have been banned from travelling.