PIFF: Features From the Other Asia

The latest article on the Pusan Int’l Film Festival currently underway has been posted over at the East Wind-up Chronicle. I didn’t have time to post the pictures, but there are some interesting ones if you check out the original article.

Amidst all the Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese films at PIFF it’s easy to forget the other Asia–central or west Asia as it’s often known by Koreans.

In recent years Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan have all had films showcased at PIFF. And some would argue the best Asian film-making–since the 70s–comes from Iran, a country that is always well-represented at PIFF.

Darezhan Omirbayev is probably Kazakhstan’s best-known director at the moment and his latest project Chouga was screened at PIFF. The film, a fractured meditation on the nature of fate and love uses a Kazakhstan fully in the throws of modernization as its backdrop. However, unlike many of the films from China and Korea at PIFF, any questions of class aren’t addressed by Omirbayev.

Chouga is like an Iranian or Russian film in the sense that the story is revealed in broadly drawn cycles. A man loves a woman who is with another man. They part ways and the woman, who would appear to be the focus of the piece, becomes secondary, ending up having a baby by the first man toward the end of the film.

In the middle is the story of the second man, who later meets a married woman and inspires her to leave her husband and beloved 7-year-old son for him. The new couple is caught up in their love, but the film’s climax is when love-at-first-sight begins to erode, and the woman is left alone with her jerk.

Almost by rule Iranian films are cyclical in nature, and with the third installment of PIFF’s ongoing “Remapping of New Asian Auteur Cinema” section they picked one of the masters–Dariush Mehrjui.

His film The Cow, made in 1969, is well-known as one of the great, if not the greatest, Iranian film ever made. Originally baned by Iranian censors the film was smuggled to the 1971 Venice Film Festival where it received a critics award. It’s legend grew from there.

Like many Iranian films, “The Cow” uses a simple life to express something about mankind. A man living in a small village is rarely seen without his cow. The cow is his best friend and companion, and the man is often seen lavashing love and affection upon it. One day he leaves the village and the cow falls ill and dies. The villagers bury the cow and when the man returns protectively try to convince him the cow has run away.

He doesn’t believe them, and as he searches for his cow, the line between his own identity, and that of his cow begins to blur. He starts to wonder if he himself is his beloved cow.

Five other Mehrjui films screened at PIFF, including his latest Santuri, and also Leila, which takes the viewer inside the world of polygamy. He doesn’t so much pose judgement on the practice, but explores it from the perspective of the women involved.

One of the best films I saw at PIFF in 2005 was Kilometre Zero, an Iraqi movie by Hiner Sallem about a Kurdish solider, who at the dawn of Saddam Hussein’s extermination campaign, is ordered to escort the dead body of a fellow solider across northern Iraq to his hometown.

This time Saleem is represented by Dol, another metaphoric political road movie where the protaganist heads out on a journey and ends up interacting with several facets of his own personality. Not unlike the man in The Cow the man must come to terms with his own existentialism by continuously meeting other versions of himself.

This is the third installment in our ongoing coverage of the 12th Pusan International Film Festival. A preview of the festival can be found here, as well as a second piece; PIFF’s Patience Paying Dividends for New Asian Cinema.