SAMIRA MAKHMALBAF IS THE WONDER DIRECTOR OF CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Safa Haeri

PARIS 14^TH May (IPS )
Though the international Film Festival at the French posh resort city of Cannes is in its first week, but it has already found it's "darling" in the twenty years-old Iranian Samira Makhmalbaf, the youngest ever Director to be in competition in this world famous movie fiesta.

Hardly a day passes without the international media, from the most serious ones such as the French austere "Le Monde" to the British tabloids, from the "International Herald Tribune" to television and radio stations in a remote Danish city to Japanese dailies with millions of circulation that do not carry articles and interviews about this young, frail, fragile looking but though mind "phenomenon".

Shot in Iranian Kurdistan with actors, except one professional in Ms. Behnaz Ja'fari, taken among ordinary people, -- following in this process world acclaimed Iranian directors such as her own father, Mohsen and Abbas Kiarostami --, "Blackboard" is her second film presented at Cannes after "The Apple", shown two years ago in the "A Certain Regard" section of the festival.

"It happens, fortunately though, that one is charmed, or interested, or even both in the cinema. But it is rare that one is really surprised. With Samira Makhmalbaf's second film, one is staggered. Not once on a "shot" or over a "trick", but permanently, from the start to the end in this movie comparable to no nothing, absolutely unforeseeable in its tonality, its dramatic construction as well as in its them", commented Mr. Jean Michel Frodon in the influential daily "Le Monde".

"Blackboard" is about "roving" teachers carrying their blackboards in the rough mountains of Kurdistan in search of passing on to others, bunch of young boys involved in smuggling, fraud and violence, the by-product of the eight years of bloody war between Iran and Iraq for one or old men and women looking for a place to spent the last days of their life for the other.

"Everyone in the film carry a burden: teachers their blackboards, children smuggled goods, old ones those who can walk no more and the woman her child…of course, there are symbols, but first of all physical sensations that the audience feels", she explained in an interview.

"Blackboard" is the "encounter" of an idea from her father who helped her in the original scenario and the editing and the place, these sumptuous landscape of Kurdisan, often referred to as the Switzerland, where the teachers vehicles their blackboards, or their knowledge, she says, pointing out that she shot the scenes "as they came by", regardless of "mountains" of ethnic, linguistic, logistic and other difficulties, land mines left over from the war time, starting with directing ordinary, traditional people not used to be "directed" by a woman, particularly a young one like her.

The oldest in a "traditionalist" family, Samira came to the movie world before finishing high school. "Movie making is a tradition with us", she observes. There is her father, Mohsen, a former fundamentalist turned "reformist" like many young Iranian intellectuals in the Islamic Republic, her stepmother, Marzyeh, who just finished "The Day That I became a Woman" and her brother who made a movie on the filming of "Blackboard".

With he black eyes scrutinising everything and her hands that never stop moving, like a Javanese dancer, Samira is in a way the product of all contradictions generated by the Islamic regime of Iran. "People keep asking me how can I make movie, you are so thin, so young, so little and above all a woman. But do I have to be fat old man. The important is to be free in one's mind and soul", she notes with a smile as broad, convincing smile. ENDS SAMIRA MAKHMALBAF 15500