Femors of filmmakers with orientation: Marva Nabili on “The Selced Soil” | Interviews

Recently restored by the archives of the film and television of the UCLA, the austere drama of Marva Nabili “The Seled Soil”, the first existing feature film directed by a woman from Iran, is a wonder. Shoted in the isolated village of Ghalleh Noo-Asgar, the film explores the life of a young woman, Rooy-Bekheir (Flora Shabavis), who, like her country, finds himself in the middle of an agitated transition between the world of traditions and modernity.

Eighteen and single, she is considered an old maid. At the start of the film, she rejects another contender. Coating in a daily routine of tasks, it only finds freedom when it is alone of nature. She looks at the young children of the village going to school opposite in a new modern colony. They have a taste of a country on the verge of change, a world Rooy-Bekheir aspires to and is frightened. When his parents present another pretender to him, a nervous breakdown is misinterpreted as a demonic possession, forcing Rooy-Bekheir to face his future once and for all.

Although the film never played in Iran, when it was released in 1977, it screened in festivals around the world, collecting comparisons with “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels” and “Gertrud” by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Presence of the external and internal examination of the film of the life of this young woman, the cinema researcher B. Ruby Rich wrote that the film shows “how desperate a woman’s self -awareness can be when neither the old manners nor the new one offers him any escape of servitude”.

Born in Iran in 1941, Marva Nabili studied painting at the University of Decorative Arts in Tehran, where she met the filmmaker Fereydoun Rahnema. Later, she played in her film “Siavash at Persepolis”, which won the Jean Epstein prize at the Locarno film festival. Encouraged by Rahnema, Nabili moved to London and later in New York, studying cinema at the University of the City of New York and the Goddard College.

His first feature film “The Seled Soil” was named film of the exceptional year at the London Film Festival, and Nabili received the best director of the Interazional Mostra Del Film d’Autore, Sanremo. His film “Nightsongs”, which recounts the life of a family of Chinese immigrants living in New York, was one of the first scenarios developed through the Sundance Institute of Robert Redford and was then produced by the PBS American Playhouse series.

For female filmmakers of this month in the Focus column, Rogerebert.com spoke to Nabili by phone to bring him a Brechtian view to the cinema, to capture the verve of life in remote villages before the Iranian revolution, and stories that take place in transitional spaces.

The interview was published for more clarity and length.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDN0_J_A1Y8

When you develop the story of this film, did you realize that you wanted to put it in the village?

My sister lived in the region. She had a house about half an hour drive to this village. So I was looking for places, and I found this village, and I fell in love.

What has the village attracted you?

This is what we call in Persian a castle, but it is not really a castle. It is a village surrounded by walls. Thus, the small pieces you see in the film are all inside this large wall. I had never seen anything like this. So I went there and I looked at the villages, and I really liked them very much, and I thought it would be a good location.

Did you immediately know that you wanted to make a film about this generation of girls who are in this transitional space?

Yes, because I, as a young girl, I also refused anyone who wanted to marry me, because I had just graduated and I was interested in discovering other people who felt like that. When I went to this village, there was really a girl who refused to get married, so I knew it was a good subject. I wrote my script, then I went there with Flora Shabavis, who was the only actress of the film.

And the other characters are all played by the villagers who really lived in the village?

Yes, everyone, whatever they did in the film, that’s what they do. They just spent their day.

Obviously, chickens play a very big role in this film, but without spoiling it for readers, I imagine that chickens were also part of the daily life of the village.

Yes, that’s what they had there. It was fundamentally the only meat they would eat. They worked on a farm, but the farm had no place to sell meat and all that. So they have raised a lot of chickens.

The way you put the scenes is almost pictorial, but you have these chickens that add to these diapers. I imagine that the chickens have sort of done what they wanted, or did you try to move the chickens in the frame?

No, no, I had no control over these chickens. It was good with me. It was fun because it was part of the lives of people who lived in the village.

I had read that you studied miniature painting.

In fact, I didn’t do it. I was fascinated by miniature painting, but I did not study it. I went to university to study painting, but not miniature painting. So I obtained my diploma from the university, then I have always been fascinated by miniature painting because it was one of the main arts in Iran for a long time, and that continues. I thought this place looked like a small village in a miniature paint.

While you place your camera, did you think you try to visually recreate this feeling of looking at a miniature paint?

No, not really. I studied Bertolt Brecht and I was very influenced by his method, so I thought I would have a Brechthia vision of all this place.

Many of these photos are incredibly long. Would you like to use an entire coil for a blow?

I pulled over 16 mm, so it was not so difficult. It was not like 35 mm, where you should continue to change the coils. The length of the shots was really inspired by the rhythm of the village. This is how they lived. I did not tell anyone what to do, except for Flora, so they all did what they were always doing.

I love the contrast that you create between her in the village walls and that she went out to recover wood, her being by the water, and she removing her hair, surrounded by this beautiful green grass. What do you hope to evoke with this contrast?

Well, it was there that she went to collect wood, and for her, it was like living in the woods, which were very green. She felt very free there. She was not under pressure by her parents or by the villagers not to get married, so it was not a corner in which she went every day just to sit there and contemplate. She was very comfortable there.

Do you think that at that time, women had many spaces where they could be comfortable like that?

Well, it was in the desert. What happened is that the Shah had recently built a village on the other side of this area where its parents live, and that the children, if you notice the film, go to the other side to go to school because it was something new to the city that the Shah had built. Basically, they developed there so that these people can move there, but most of them did not want to move.

I thought it was really interesting how you brought the economy in this decision, like the way they will have to start buying their grocery store in the city store. It was almost as if, by moving to modern amenities, they abandoned part of their own autonomy.

In most villages, everyone sat down and discussed if he wanted to move there. They all thought about it, but not my character. She was not interested in the new village. But, at the end of the film, when you see it for the first time with the pot on your head, and it stands there because it will go to the other side for the first time. She had to give up in a way to start this new way of life.

I love that a large part of the film concerns these transitional spaces. It is a girl who goes through the transition to femininity. The city is in transition. The country is in transition. What would you hope to show on all these transition states?

Everything across the country became like that. They were trying to modernize. Due to the oil situation, the Shah was trying to improve the country, the villages and everything else, and to bring modernity.

Do you feel like your film still has something to say in modern times in Iran?

Well, I made this film in 1976 and I left Iran when we finished. I smuggled the film because I did not know if people who worked at the airport wanted to see something like that and present an idea like that in the outside world. I put the film smuggling because Iran changed, but not fast enough.

Have you ever been able to show the film in Iran?

No.

So it’s been over 50 years, and there still hasn’t been scratched there?

I left Iran and I haven’t returned since the Revolution. So I didn’t show it there. I do not know what their expectations are.

When you watch your film, can you come back a little in your country?

Yeah, I mean, I love it. This is why I went to this village, because I like this kind of configuration. And people were very nice. They are not mean or something like that. I just didn’t want to go after the revolution. Things had changed a lot.

When the film was published for the first time, you discussed in the interviews how difficult it was for a woman to make films in Iran, but now, obviously, there are many difficulties, I think that for many filmmakers in the country.

We used to have a very good film industry there. Very wide and really nice filmmakers were there because there was freedom. In addition, the Shah wanted to modernize the cities and wanted the Iranians to be modernized, not like the leaders who are there now. After the revolution, it completely changed. What the filmmakers did then was very modern, but I don’t know what’s going on now.

What do you hope that the public will take your film today?

Well, I want them to know this social problem that women had. In the villages at that time, women had to marry when they were very young, sometimes twelve or thirteen. But there were women who refused. It was all my goal: to show that things were changing.

Are there filmmakers who have influenced you or think that people should look for?

I was interested in becoming a filmmaker after Fereydoun Rahnema, my university teacher, who had made a documentary on Persepolis, decided to make a feature film entitled “Siavash at Persepolis”. Siavash is the name of a man who was prince. I asked myself to play the role of the woman. So we shot this film in the ruins of Persepolis, and I became very fascinated by the process because it was a modern film. It was not a kind of old -fashioned film. He had studied cinema in France. It encouraged me and he continued to encourage me to leave Iran and study cinema. So I dedicated my film to him.