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Land is the third full-length film from director deriving from Iran, Babak Jalali. Radio Dreams, his previous, quite successful work, was shown among others at the 32nd edition of Warsaw Film Festival two years ago. One will be mistaken if expecting a typical Iranian cinema, because the director is producing his style more and more efficiently, moving away from his colleagues in an abandoned homeland. The movie is moralizing, but it does it with original delicacy and great sympathy for its characters. Despite the differences with native films, the Iranian spirit is palpable – one can read Sufi wisdom between the lines.

This time Babak Jalali is trying to present an experience seemingly far from his autopsy. The subject is not about the immigrant (like in Radio Dreams), but about the indigenous people of North America living in the dusty and deserted reservation. It seems that the director is far from the heroes’ experiences, and yet each subsequent frame shows a deep understanding and proves that Jalali is the right candidate for this task.

The artist can recognize the schizophrenic experience of living on one’s native land and at the same time feel as in a foreign country in a place that no longer belongs to one. He can also depict the identity of reservation’s Indian community that differs from the subjectivity of Westerners. To say “family” about them would be a distortion, it would not be enough. There are no individual units, the smallest measure of community is a group. When one of the heroes goes to the hospital, a whole group comes to see him, because he is part of this mass composed of many bodies. The tragedy – that is, the death of the youngest brother, a soldier on duty in Afghanistan – which the community experiences by drowning in alcohol and (righteous, but sad) resentments, takes on depth.

Warsaw Film Festival – press materials

The feeling of injustice and senseless death dictated by the struggle for the homeland, which no longer belongs to them, becomes an inflammatory link of maturing hatred brooding under the skin. Perhaps self-hatred is the leading feeling here. Land should be seen not only as a decent anti-war anti-western, a voice of opposition to hatred dictated by ethnic differences, but also as a solid, neomodernistic piece of art. A lot is happening here outside the frame, and the characters are locked up in a loop of addictions, from which they are unable to escape, the monotony of life next to the contempt of whites and in the cage associated with post state collective farms, which cannot be escaped – a reservation.

In addition, the Iranian confirms that he has an excellent ear and a sense of music. There is no kitsch here. The songs will be exactly where you need them, and silence and a display of skillfully dosed emotions will be in the right places also.

The direction typical for westerns – departure towards the setting sun – is as much a salute to the classics of the genre as a symbol of the collapse of the world, the end of the American dream, nowadays (or rather it has always been like that) including a narrow group of beneficiaries forgetting about the (not only economic) minorities of the system and the inevitability of cultures slowly dying in reservation-cages.

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Mateusz Tarwacki

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Laura Przybylska
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