![]() A fairytale-like story of longing and belonging, filmed in the enchanting and ever-shifting sandscapes of Tunisia and Iran. As the tale of the prince unfolds, the two encounter other travelers with stories of their own-including Osman, who longs for the beautiful woman he met at the bottom of a well, and Zaid, who searches for the ravishing young woman who fled from him after being seduced by his songs. To keep Ishtar entertained, Bab'Aziz relays the ancient tale of a prince who relinquished his realm in order to remain next to a small pool in the desert, staring into its depths while contemplating his soul. With faith as their only guide, the two journey for days through the expansive, barren landscape. Together they wander the desert in search of a great reunion of dervishes that takes place just once every thirty years. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.Bab'Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul is the story of a blind dervish named Bab'Aziz and his spirited granddaughter, Ishtar. Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Love film? Join BBC Culture Film Club on Facebook, a community for film fanatics all over the world. How many of these films have you seen? Let us know with the hashtag #WorldFilm100 on Facebook and Twitter. Great foreign-language films made by women Great foreign-language masterpieces you may not know The full list of critics who participated – and how they voted What the critics had to say about the top 25 Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest foreign-language films: Among his books is Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (Verso 2001). Hamid Dabashi teaches the Social and Intellectual History of Iran, Comparative Literature, and World Cinema at Columbia University in New York. These directors, who have deep roots in the most enduring aspects of Iranian cinema, now carry its future into uncharted territories. ![]() Meanwhile, outside Iran, and from the fertile ground of its transnational origins, a new generation of Iranian film-makers has emerged, chief among them Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop, 2007) and Shirin Neshat (Women without Men, 2009). It was a transformative moment in the global reception of Iranian cinema and, with it, Iran itself. I was at the festival that year and saw how the global perception of Iran changed overnight from a bearded angry man (Khomeini) to the bright smiling face of a young film-maker. While Kiarostami was established as the leading Iranian film-maker on the world stage, the Makhmalbaf family put a particularly poignant spin on the perception of Iranian cinema, particularly when Samira Makhmalbaf premiered her debut film The Apple (1998) at the Cannes Film Festival when she was just 18. By this time Kiarostami was a known and fairly successful film-maker in Iran, but his reception in Europe suddenly placed him next to Vittorio De Sica of Bicycle Thieves (1948), Yasujirō Ozu of Tokyo Story (1953) and Satyajit Ray of The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) and gave his work global power and significance. It was immediately after the global success of The Runner that the world took notice of Abbas Kiarostami, when his now classic film Where is the Friend's Home? (1985) premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. ![]() Shot in multiple locations in the south of the country during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), The Runner crafted a cinematic landscape of its own, following the solitary life of a young boy mesmerised by running, to which Naderi gave a deeply moving, allegorical significance. What brought the focus back to Iranian cinema was Amir Naderi’s masterwork, The Runner (1984), which was something of a revelation when it premiered at the Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes. Based on a short story by Gholam-hossein Saedi, The Cow told the story of a villager and his unique anthropomorphic relationship with his animal with astonishing visual and narrative panache.Īlthough there were many crucial developments in Iranian cinema in the 1970s, the world’s attention was captured by the Iranian Revolution of 1977-1979. Before that fateful decade had ended, Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969) was smuggled out of Iran and screened at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, where it won the critics’ prize (Fipresci) a screening in Berlin further consolidated its global recognition as a defining moment in the emerging Iranian cinema. ![]()
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