Most Americans’ experience of Iranian film is limited to the Miramaxable sensibility of Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven, Baran), and for at least the first half of THE WILLOW TREE (2005; November 19 at 3:45 pm; November 24 at 8 pm), the director seems to have surrendered his love of whorish pandering and manipulative sub-realism. But the viscerally felt saga of a long-blind professor and father (Parvis Parastui, exuding history and angst like a bear god) traveling to Paris for an operation and regaining his sight eventually swaps out its emotional torque (imagine returning to a cheering crowd in the airport and not knowing which woman is your wife) for tortured mid-life-crisis cheap shots.

Still, it’s a sight more nuanced than Tahmineh Milani’s CEASE FIRE (2006; November 10 at 7:45 pm; November 26 at 3:30 pm), which, dramatizing a credited source book titled Recovery of Your Inner Child, comes off as a Muslim-screwball version of The War of the Roses, except it’s never funny and spends much of its time in therapy. Star Mahnaz Afshar, it should be said, may just be the beautiful movie actress at work anywhere in the world. At least Ali Rafiee’s WHEN FISH FALL IN LOVE (2005; November 17 at 8 pm; November 25 at 3:45 pm) skirts efforts at abject comedy, but the mysterious-exile-returns-to-his-home-town-and-embittered-love tale depends entirely on its inexpressive characters’ keeping revelations to themselves. If they spoke frankly, it’d be a 10-minute short.

Iran’s unique social knots are better voiced in Tamir Hamz & Mark Lazarz’s low-tech but meticulous documentary SOUNDS OF SILENCE (2006; December 2 at 12:15 pm), which explores the vagaries of the Iranian music industry, an apparent hall of mirrors in which contemporary musicians, producers, and even retailers never know for sure what is permissible under Sharia and what is not. The articulation (particularly by rock journalist Shadi Vatanparast) of the regime’s byzantine rules for lyric content, women singers, etc., speaks volumes, even as the officially condemned culture persists in a nation where nearly 65 percent of the populace is 25 or under.

Likewise, Ensieh Shah-Hosseini’s GOODBYE LIFE (2006; November 24 at 6 pm), though hampered by budget and soap opera, revisits the Iraq-Iran war from the point of view of a young woman who, dressed as a soldier, attempts to traverse the war-torn landscape without getting raped or left in a mass grave. It sounds a smidgen more riveting than it actually is. Maziar Miri’s GRADUALLY (2005; November 18 at 6:30 pm), however, is a pulsing little nightmare that sounds thin only on the surface. A railway worker in the outlands learns that his unstable wife has vanished; returning to Tehran, he searches for her (with great difficulty — he can’t even view female corpses at the morgue), and the hunt itself becomes subject to social prejudice and stigma. Eventually it becomes clear that the search and the sense of lostness signify larger things, and at 74 flinty minutes Miri’s film acquires the grounded resonance of a Kafka tale.

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