Now in its ninth year, this year’s MENA Film Festival in Vancouver features cinematic works from across the Middle East and West Asia, with the theme Dreamscapes.
According to the festival organisers, “The programme focuses on exploring the MENA/SWANA narratives, leaning into the absurdity, horror, and magic of contemporary everyday life.”
Also featured are two Vancouver premieres from the international festival circuit, including Aslı Özarslan’s Elbow, a rather dystopian ‘dreamscape’ about an alienated Turkish teenager in Berlin, facing discrimination, unemployment, and eventually criminal charges.
Motherland, a short film by award-winning Toronto-based writer and director Jasmin Mozaffari, is another highlight and is sure to be popular in a city with a 50,000-strong Iranian diaspora. It arrives here after winning accolades internationally, including best drama at the 2024 Hollyshorts Film Festival in LA and the Jury Prize for Drama at the 2024 Aspen Shortsfest.
Based on the story of the Iranian-Canadian filmmaker’s parents, the semi-autobiographical film is set in 1979, at the height of the Iran Hostage Crisis.
It follows the story of young Babak (played with great spirit and sensitivity by Vancouver-based Iranian actor Behtash Fazlali) as he goes on a trip to meet his fiancée’s parents and ends up confronting the realities of what it means to be an Iranian immigrant in a patriotic post-Vietnam America.
The film itself is a vehicle for catharsis – both familial and global – and a timely call for healing of the Iranian-American relationship at yet another pivotal point in their histories.
Opening with old newsreels of the hostage-taking at the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and newspaper headlines calling for all Iranians to be deported, it feels eerily prescient in these Trumpian times.
The newsreels cut to a terrifying scene of Babak being chased across a university campus by a tall white man. In Babak’s hand is a poster he has torn from a bulletin board featuring a mushroom cloud and the words, “Nuke them in Iran, it worked in Japan.”
He is soon cornered by the much larger American man but begins to burn the poster in front of him.
The next scene features a subdued Babak nursing a black eye in a campus dorm he shares with another Iranian student. As the two discuss the situation in their homeland and the growing anti-Iranian sentiment – fuelled by nightly newscasts and jingoistic media – in their adopted country, the phone rings ominously. Is it the campus police come to take them away? Or is it Babak’s pretty, blonde American fiancée, Katie? It turns out to be Babak’s mother in Tehran, calling to check up on him. “Go to Canada,” she advises her son, “it will be safer.”
We soon learn that although he is confident enough to take on an American man twice his size, he hasn’t had the courage to tell his Iranian mother about his looming marriage to Katie (played winningly by Oriana Leman).
The high-paced, frenetic pace of the film that draws the audience in is punctuated by tightly focused scenes of emotional intimacy between the equally excellent actors. Alternately fast and then slow, the film is a river of densely packed narrative – like a feature film rolled into a 25-minute short.
On the road to meet his white in-laws in rural America with his fiancée Katie, Babak stops at a gas station, catches a glimpse of the front page of a newspaper showing blindfolded Americans being paraded in front of cameras by their captors, and decides to shave off his beard. Left with only a 1970s-style moustache, he tells Katie that he now resembles Al Pacino.
Indeed, the film pays homage to Hollywood even as it subverts it. Although at times it feels like cinematic revenge for the excesses of Not Without My Daughter and Fargo, Motherland has more than a passing similarity to the style and pace of 70s classics like Dog Day Afternoon.
At a Country and Western, square-dancing party, Babak meets his future father-in-law, well-played by veteran Canadian character actor John Ralston. The scene recalls Harry Dean Stanton in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.
While the two bond temporarily over their shared immigrant experience as the father-in-law reveals the prejudice he and his family faced as German newcomers to America, any pretense of solidarity ends abruptly when he tells Babak point-blank, “My daughter will not be your effing green card.”
After Babak and his fiancée return to their roadside motel, a now-drunk and distraught Katie suggests the pair bypass family drama to get married at City Hall.
Later, in a poignant dark night of the soul moment at a payphone outside the motel, a panicked Babak calls his mother in Tehran and says she needs to send him money for a ticket home. She advises him that the situation is far too dangerous for him to return. Realising he is trapped between two worlds while belonging to none, he cries like a child as a recorded message from the American operator tells him that his call has been disconnected.
The existential angst continues into the final scene, as the young lovers drive home in sullen silence, revealing a cultural chasm between them that may never be crossed.
Alas, Iran and America – a tragic love story.
But luckily for cinephiles everywhere, Jasmin’s own parents had a happy ending.
Part of a growing culture of Iranian-Canadian filmmakers in diaspora – like Montreal-based Sadaf Foroughi – Jasmin is also part of a global phenomenon of Iranian filmmakers who came of age after the Revolution.
“I made Motherland as a necessary exercise,” Jasmin told The New Arab in a phone interview from her Toronto home.
“I wanted to make this because there aren’t a lot of diasporic films about the immigrant experience made by Iranians,” she notes. “There have been poorly drawn attempts made by non-Iranians, like House of Sand and Fog. But now is the time for us to reclaim our stories.”
Like the film’s central character, Jasmin’s father was called Babak, and he came to study in rural Massachusetts in 1979. After his mother advised him that it would be safer to go to Canada, he met and married Jasmin’s mother in Saskatchewan, the daughter of an immigrant German father, who, like his filmic double, disapproved of his new son-in-law.
Jasmin told The New Arab that she only learned after the film had been made that her father had been beaten up by a mob in a bar outside of Boston at the height of the hostage crisis – lending the film’s opening scene a preternatural prescience.
“I wanted to tell the story of the Iranian-American relationship,” she says, “through metaphor.”
“North Americans who aren’t Middle Eastern,” she notes, “if they saw a political film, they would just shut down. They need to see a human story – like The Graduate, which addressed Vietnam-era America, or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which addressed racism. I watched all these films, and they really influenced me.”
Growing up in rural Ontario near a town called Barrie, Jasmin herself faced racism in the post-9/11 era – a time she says has parallels with the era of the hostage crisis and today.
She faced the traditional pan-foreigner racial slur of ‘paki’ and says that “my dad was absolutely paranoid, telling us we should never reveal our Iranian identity.”
The reference to Al Pacino in the film, she says, was based on historical fact.
“In the 70s, Hollywood films like The Godfather were very popular in Iran. After all, it was a film about the immigrant experience, and at the time, Iranian guys tried to model themselves after him – and often tried to ‘pass’ as Italians.”
Another popular figure was Bruce Lee, whose films were huge in Iran. “He was a non-white, immigrant hero – successful and cool.”
In many ways, Motherland speaks not only to the Iranian-American relationship but also to the pervasive influence of Hollywood – and the director’s subtle subversion of it. In essence, her film beats Hollywood at its own game.
But the process of making Motherland – which was well received by both Jasmin’s Iranian and Canadian relatives, as well as audiences around the world – was a hugely emotional experience for both Jasmin and the Iranian cast and crew.
“Not only did making the film help me learn more about my father (who passed away 10 years ago) at the time of his youth,” she tells The New Arab, “but we shot it during the Women, Life, Freedom movement. It brought up so many memories for all of us. It was a very moving experience.”
Ultimately, the timing of production, “made us realise how important it was to continue to tell Iranian stories. It was my goal with Motherland to humanise us as Iranians, as immigrants, and to purposefully reclaim our narratives.”
Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone and has been writing from and about the MENA since 1992. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient sites and modern culture in Iraq. www.hadaniditmars.com
