I saw this film in lovely 35mm at the Arab and Iranian Film Festival in Seattle in 2002. Unfortunately, most people won't be able to catch it on film, and probably not even on video.
The story revolves around a loose-knit group of Iranians who collect and sell scrap metal near the Iran-Iraq border in the years following the war. Central among these is an Iranian boy of about 15 whose story forms the core of the film.
Needless to say, the scrap metal they are collecting is all military scrap left over from the war with Iraq -- guns, tanks, bullets, artillery shells, land-mines. It's a dangerous line of work. A platonic flirtation develops between the boy and a local girl -- somehow all the more poignant because nothing ever happens between them -- as he takes greater and greater risks to collect and dismantle land-mines to earn a living. There is also a friendship between the main character and his younger friend, who is of African descent. They live together on an abandoned ship in the middle of a river, and there is an obvious allusion to Huckleberry Finn at work.
The images in this film are stark and stunning, and the anti-war message subtle enough that it doesn't get in the way of the visual storytelling. On the whole, I thought this was a beautiful, humanist film, one that deserves to be seen far more than almost any film coming out of Hollywood now. It's a shame that it was never really distributed in the west.
The story revolves around a loose-knit group of Iranians who collect and sell scrap metal near the Iran-Iraq border in the years following the war. Central among these is an Iranian boy of about 15 whose story forms the core of the film.
Needless to say, the scrap metal they are collecting is all military scrap left over from the war with Iraq -- guns, tanks, bullets, artillery shells, land-mines. It's a dangerous line of work. A platonic flirtation develops between the boy and a local girl -- somehow all the more poignant because nothing ever happens between them -- as he takes greater and greater risks to collect and dismantle land-mines to earn a living. There is also a friendship between the main character and his younger friend, who is of African descent. They live together on an abandoned ship in the middle of a river, and there is an obvious allusion to Huckleberry Finn at work.
The images in this film are stark and stunning, and the anti-war message subtle enough that it doesn't get in the way of the visual storytelling. On the whole, I thought this was a beautiful, humanist film, one that deserves to be seen far more than almost any film coming out of Hollywood now. It's a shame that it was never really distributed in the west.
