YOUNG IRANIAN FEMALE DIRECTOR AWARDED AT CANNES

CANNES 26 May (IPS)          Samira Makhmalbaf of Iran received on Sunday the Jury’s Prize of the Cannes’s International Film Festival for her “At Five in the Afternoon”, which the critics said is a "vision rooted in political reality and the poetry of dreams for tomorrow."

Set in post Taleban Afghanistan, Panj e asr, is the story of a beautiful Afghan woman who lives in an ultra-orthodox family and wants to become the country’s President.

"Through this story of an Afghani family, the film made by Samira Makhmalbaf evokes the tension between tradition and the modern world", the six-members jury said.

"By focusing on the roles of women in building a new society, she suggests a way towards the future", a statement from the jury said.

The film starts with a group of women walking in the dust, dressed in their all-covering blue burqa when one of them, Nogreh (Silver), removes the burqa and puts on high-heeled shoes to join a class in a secular school.

When the teacher asks the girls what they would like to do after they finish school, Noqreh immediately says to become president of the country.

However, her bearded father, who finds too much to bear the irreligious "blasphemy" of liberated Kabol and the efforts of her daughter to make the best use from the freedom that exists, flees into the desert with her, his stepdaughter and her sick baby to avoid seeing women's bared faces and listening to music, once banned by the Taleban, while American jetfighters and helicopters are patrolling in the bleu sky.

“On the streets of Kabol, I saw these women living under the burqa. I heard their voices and I thought, oh, there is a live woman under that burqa”, she told "The New York Time"’s Joan Dupont.

"Though the Taleban have gone, their ideas are anchored in peoples' minds, in their traditions and culture. Taleban is not just a group, it is any kind of fanatic government, any ignorance", the 22 yeas-old Ms Makhmalbaf said, adding that in her view, there is no difference between American President George W. Bush, “also a fanatic”, and the Taleban.

Panj e Asr, is Ms. Makhmalbaf’s second award at Cannes, where she won a special prize in 2000 for her "Blackboards", the story of several Kurdish teachers looking for students in the mountains.

"I wanted to show reality, not the clichés on television saying that the US went to Afghanistan and rescued the people from the Taleban, that the US did a Rambo", she told journalists, dressed in a black robe and wearing a black scarf, as recommended by the Iranian authorities.

Samira’s father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of Iran’s most renowned directors, who also won several international awards, the last one for his “Qandahar”, which was shot months before the 11 September 2001 and the ensuing toppling of the Taleban under American military intervention in Afghanistan.

Mr. Makhmalbaf wrote the story of At Five in the Afternoon, with the title being inspired from a poem by the famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s “A le Cinco de la Tarde”. 

The Jury created this year’s surprise by awarding the coveted Palme d’Or to Gus Van Sant for “Elephant”, a film that enters the lives of United States students to see how they cope with shootings and violence at school.

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan of Turkey won the runner-up Grand Prix for “Uzak (Distance) and the film's two main actors, Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, jointly won best actor, an honour that goes posthumously to Toprak, Ceylan's cousin, after he died in a car accident the day after learning Uzak had been selected for Cannes. ENDS SAMIRA MAKHMALBAF 26503ENDS SAMIRA MAKHMALBAF 26503