Has anyone ever seen something more deceiving than the grand gates to any given large-scale villa, which shuts itself closed over the world and gives off the sensation that “amongst ourselves, the rich, everything is fine”? Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Reza Aslani closes his 1976 film with a shot in which a woman – the sole survivor of an internecine war over riches and power – pulls her chador on, then decidedly leaves the courtyard which had, up to that point, never been left throughout the duration of the film. The camera frees itself alongside this silhouette, leaving us in the company of a beautiful panoramic shot, taken from a height, which, for the first time, pulls us out of the tensions reigning over these unventilated palace chambers, inhabited only by hate, gluttony and other such evil tides, and offers us in exchange the image of a town that is discernible up to its most modern and proletarian distances. A camera is needed to penetrate the secrets of this tenebrous world which, in the name of etiquette, is capable of hypocrisy and displays of grandeur; behind closed doors, however, the unhappy aristocrats inhabiting it are ready to launch the massacre.

Victor Morozov

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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

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