Iranian Film on Third Day of Zagreb Film Festival

Sunday was in rumba rhythm, Sunday in the rhythm of drums and Tuesday in slow rhythm. One needs to rest sometimes.

The third evening of the Zagreb Film Festival offered a free-of-charge screening of the film “99 Francs” by French director Jan Kounen, which attracted so many visitors to the Students’ Centre that many of them, including reporters, were left outside to look at the doors instead of the silver screen. Inside, people were cramped together and there was no room for anybody to squeeze in. We hope that those who were standing for the entire 100 minutes of the film thought the film was worth it. We moved to the cinema to comfort ourselves with films that opened the competition part of the evening.

Suspicions and suspicions about suspicions

The first film of the evening was “Der Verdacht” by German director Felix Hassenfratz. In the 25 minutes of the film we took a look in the life of baker Conny whose peaceful everyday life is disturbed by suspicions of the community that her husband Udo is the killer of a girl whose body was found several months before. Udo had been behaving strangely lately (but is that unusual, considering the situation?) and Conny’s suspicions of her husband and the suspicions of others grow stronger. The situation culminates when Conny finds a gun in a locked drawer. As Udo catches her discovering the gun, she points the gun at him and he asks her to shoot him if she does not believe him. Conny does not shoot and the disappointed Udo leaves, leaving her alone with her suspicions and suspicions about suspicions. The film was awarded by a feeble applause from the public from which we could hear suggestions for a more “effective” end, but in the end the opinion of the panel of judges will be counted.

Beautiful, boring and funny at the same time 

“The Three of Them” (An Seh), a feature film by Iranian director Naghi Nemati, first left us breathless with its beautiful film photography. As the film developed (although the beautiful imagery of a snow-swept wasteland is seen throughout the 80-minute film), we closed our mouths and began thinking about the characters in whose world Nemati dragged us. Yousef, Dariush and Essi are three soldiers suffering at military training a long way away from home, family and civilisation. One day they decide to make a run for it in the middle of a snow storm. But since they themselves do not know where they are going, their flight turns into an odyssey full of suffering. The tense atmosphere is on occasion relieved by comic elements, such as the excellent scene when the soldiers, who are in the middle of nowhere and on the edge of desperation, dance around a small fire to sounds from the radio, or the one in which smugglers fall into deep snow with every step. A meeting with an abandoned pregnant woman who joins them changes the relationship of the deserters. The cold is relentless on their bodies, as well as their souls and in the end they all succumb to its freezing breath – all of them except the woman giving birth… Frozen in time in a series of photographs that symbolise the freezing of their souls, the three of them say farewell to this world, freezing to death together. And they were never that close.