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June 3–10, 1999

movie shorts

The Apple

Based on a news story which scandalized Iran, The Apple is about a traditionalist father and a blind mother who imprison their two daughters inside their house for the first 12 years of their lives. In a unique – and ethically questionable – move, filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf decided to dramatize the situation using the actual family, to work with minimal script and merely put the family in a series of situations which she would then film. Using the blunt symbolism which seems to be a hallmark of Iranian film, Makhmalbaf doesn’t make it hard to figure out that she intends the film as a metaphor for the condition of all women in Iran – any one of the dozen shots of the girls chasing after an elusive apple makes that clear enough. But unlike the recent Endurance, The Apple doesn’t feel like an act of documentary colonialism, perhaps because the situations Makhmalbaf puts the family into are genuinely open-ended. Still, it doesn’t sit well to learn that the scene where the father was locked inside his own house to make him experience his daughter’s fate was for real, and that the old man had no idea what was going to happen. There’s no doubt that his actions were hideous, but is inverting them make them any more just?

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