Closed Curtain DVD & Download

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.

Filmography

Iran / 2013 / 106 / Farsi with English subtitles / Certificate 12A

Lee Marshall, Screen International

‘Brave, often fascinating meditation on imprisonment and escape, despair and determination, invention and reality.’

Geoff Andrew, Sight and Sound

"An allegory, dark but not despairing, of the creative spirit under political pressure, and of the ways the imagination can be both a refuge and a place of confinement."

A.O. Scott, The New York Times

'Politically persecuted Iranian master Jafar Panahi — still under house arrest and banned from filmmaking for twenty years for engaging in "propaganda" against the Islamic Republic — follows his magnificent This Is Not a Film with another brilliant and moving hybrid of video diary, essay film, and impassioned political protest.'

Dimitri Eipides, Toronto Film Festival Catalogue

'The covert setting wreaks a nearly surrealistic transformation on the stuff of daily life; footfalls and flickers of light, the click of doors and the roar of cars carry the terror of arrest. But, when the filmmakers dare to open the curtains, they see another, unofficial Iran, one that eludes their persecutors, as imagination and reality flow together in surprising and exhilarating ways'.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker

The director-actor's demeanor, despite the sorrow, is as unflappable and open as always: a gentle, warm presence, the intimations of suicide seeming almost antithetical to the simple tone of the man's body, his aspect. Which is why the admission of such darkness, of such solitude and doubt comes across with such force'.
Daniel Kasman, MUBI's Notebook

[Halfway through the film,] 'Panahi himself calmly walks across the screen, ushering in a dizzying mise en abîme which dominates the rest of the film. Jafar Panahi, in a way, is the Lionel Messi of the cinema: nothing could be less unexpected than for Panahi to pull such a move on the spectator, but no matter how well we prepare ourselves for the crucial moment, he still manages to leave us flat-footed, as he effortlessly dribbles the ball past us'.
Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema

'...a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse, the dammed-up flow of concepts and ideas brimming over its banks'.

Jesse Cataldo, Slant Magazine

'...fascinating feature'

Kristin Thomson, 'Observations on Film Art', available on David Bordwell's website

'...an admirable testament to the significance of art, and a stirring demonstration of its indomitability'.

Giovanni Marchini Camia, Film Comment

'Where This Is Not a Film was a political work through and through, Closed Curtain enfolds its politics within what I believe will go down as one of cinema’s finest, most complex acts of self-portraiture'.

Michael Sicinski, Cinemascope

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