Turkish filmmaker Gözde Kural returns to Afghanistan eight years after her feature debut, Dust, with Cinema Jazireh [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], which has world-premiered in Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe Competition and received the Commendation of the Ecumenical Jury (see the news). A 128-minute film with an unrelentingly bleak story, it will struggle to find exposure beyond the festival circuit despite the director’s gentle and perceptive approach.

We find Leila (Fereshteh Hosseini) roaming the streets of a small town at night, looking for her son Omid. He has disappeared after their house was attacked by the Taliban and her husband was murdered. Kural immediately establishes the heroine’s feeling of being lost and isolated through framing by DoP Adib Sobhani, whose handheld camera is not simply shaky, but virtually swings around her.

Two rough scenes, with Leila in painful close-ups, show that a woman just doesn’t walk around alone in Afghanistan, even when covered in a burqa. So, in an action akin to something out of a Greek tragedy, she removes gravel from her husband’s unmarked grave, cuts his beard off with scissors, glues it to her face and dresses in his clothes.

In the meantime, we find out that Cinema Jazireh is just a front for an operation in which young boys are kidnapped and trained to be transvestite prostitutes. A young boy, Azid (the wide-eyed Ali Karimi), is brought in by the boss, Waheed (Hamid Karimi), and his henchman Ashraf (Meysam Damanzeh) and is introduced to Zabur (Turkish actor Mazlum Sümer), the young resident prostitute who dances for patrons and then provides sexual services. He is to instruct Azid and two other boys.

After unsuccessfully trying at the bureau for missing persons, Leila keeps wandering the countryside until she passes out in the hands of Sinjar (Reza Akhlaghirad), a middle-aged gravedigger. He helps her get back on her feet and find Cinema Jazireh.

The film seems to be set in the 1990s, as DVD is a new technology in the contraband shop where Waheed gets a Gameboy and a camera that he allows Azid to film with, providing for an interesting additional angle (the boy is attracted to the poster for Tod Browning’s Freaks). They also get a DVD of Titanic that they watch with great interest, with “My Heart Will Go On” blaring off-screen. Little moments like this tell us that these men are not monsters, but human beings, too, bringing the story uncomfortably close to home and making it universal. The fact that Turkey’s Ministry of Culture pulled support for the feature after seeing it loudly speaks to this.

Motifs like digging up the grave, Sinjar fishing a dead body out of a river to give Leila a proper beard, or an off-screen execution of three men for selling music cassettes are partially offset by Cinema Jazireh’s pink-coloured performance room, music and laughter – and it is Zabur whose destiny is particularly touching. While Leila, who is camouflaged as a man, has a painful task but also clings on to hope, Zurab, who dresses as a woman to perform, knows of no other way of life and has a very uncertain future. This plays out as both a contrast and an overlap, just like with Kural’s sensitive, gentle observational approach, which invites us to look at pain and suffering and understand them, rather than judge – even when it comes to the Taliban. 

Cinema Jazireh is a Turkish-Iranian-Bulgarian-Romanian co-production staged by Toz Film Production, Seven Springs Pictures and Kos Kos Film, in co-production with Front Film, Soberworks, Orion and Avva Mixx.