Beloved | The Charmers | Delbaran (2001)

Synopsis

A community along the border of Iran and Afghanistan becomes an uneasy refuge for a number of illegal aliens, with the dilemma of one 14-year-old orphan providing the focus in a film from Iranian director Abolfazl Jalili.

Kaim (Karim Alizadeh) is a boy who escaped from Afghanistan into Iran after his mother was killed during a bombing raid. His father, an Afghan soldier, is still in the field and has not been heard from in months.

Kaim has been taken in by Khale and Khan, a married couple who run a small cafe in the border town of Delbarn, where Kaim earns his keep by helping out.



Mahdabi (Ahmad Mahdavi) is the chief of police in Delbaran, and he devotes much of his time to rounding up illegal immigrants, but given the steady stream of undocumented visitors who pass through the borders, there's only so much he can do.

As Kaim struggles to avoid the authorities and hold on to the small share of stability he's found with Khale and Khan, the couple discover their business is in jeopardy when the construction of a new road threatens to route traffic away from their cafe.

Delbaran received the Special Jury Prize at the 2001 Locarno Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming

Cast: Karim Alizadeh, Rahmatollah Ebrahimi, Hossein Hashemian, Ahmad Mahdavi, Ebrahim Ebrahimzadeh, Teymour Shamsi, Kobra Birjandi, Haser Kafi, Said Mohamadi, Jalal Nasari, Maryam Sharifi, Khatereh Kamyar

Locarno: Don Quixote Award, Crossair Special Prize, Karlovy Vary, London, Rotterdam

Delbaran opens with a young boy, running. Fourteen year old Kaim is an Afghan refugee who has found work helping out at Khan's Place, a truck stop close to the Iranian border, owned by the elderly Khan and his wife.

Amongst the clientele, an assortment of drivers, traders and opium smokers, is Patrol Officer Mahadavi, keeping an eye out for illegal immigrants but oblivious to Kaim's status.

The boy runs endless errands, most of which involve a succession of vehicles which seem to break down or run out of fuel on a regular basis. Movement is a constant in this film, as Kaim and the other characters traverse the barren but beautiful desert landscape, where the sounds of automatic weapons are always just within earshot.

Abolfazi Jalili's characteristically spare approach (most recently seen here in Dance of Dust)is perfectly attuned to this gentle, understated study of the harshness of political exile.

Aside from the poetic depiction of the landscape, two things stay in the mind long after viewing. Firstly, Jalili shows that amidst the repetitive minutae of daily life there is wry and unexpected humour; and secondly that even in the harshest of circumstances, there are moments of genuine human decency.

Dedicated to 'all the children of war', the film is fiction based on fact, and ends as it began, with a young boy, running. -- (Summary by Sandra Hebron)

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