The White Meadows | Keshtzar haye sepid (2009)

Synopsis

Again Rahmat has been asked to meet the inhabitants of several islands for his job, to collect their tears. Although for years people have been giving their tears to Rahmat, no one knows exactly what he has been doing with them.

Rahmat travels by boat around the villages and islands of a remote salt lake, the eerie atmosphere of the landscape (a visual homage to Theodoros Angelopoulos' The Weeping Meadow) underscoring the exotic ritual he performs - literally collecting people's tears and bottling up their secrets.



Cast: Hassan Pourshirazi, Younes Ghazali, Mohammad Rabbani, Mohammad Shirvani, Omid Zare

San Sebastian (Official Selection), Tribeca (Narrative Features Competition), San Francisco (World Cinema), Vancouver

The film invokes the feeling of a simple and exquisitely beautiful spiritual fable, subverted with some strange encounters along the way - a virgin sent to sea, a painter tortured for refusing to paint the water blue because he sees it as red.



Although the latter role is performed by filmmaker Mohammad Shirvani, it seems to presciently foreshadow Panahi's and Rasoulof's own futures.



A final pointed reference to Khomeini leaves no doubt about the sharply critical allegorical intent of Rasoulof, the film's writer, producer and director. -- Sydney Film Festival

Read about this film

Country: Iran
Language: Farsi
Color: Color
Runtime: 92 min.