Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!
35mm.
68 mins. Color/B&W. Farsi With English
Subtitles.
Tehran
is a large village near the city of Rey, full of gardens and fruit
trees. Its inhabitants live in anthill-like underground holes.
The village’s several districts are constantly at war. Tehranis’ main occupations are theft and crime,
though the king pretends they are subject to him. They grow excellent
fruits, notably an excellent pomegranate, which is found only in Tehran.
- Asar-o-Lblab,
1241 A.D.
Awards
- Winner: Best Director, 11th
House of Cinema Film Festival, 2007, Iran;
- Winner: Best Director, 25th Fajr Int. Film Festival, 2007, Iran;
- Winner: AVINI Prize for Best
Documentary of the year 2007, Iran;
- Winner: Audience Award,
CINEMA VERITE International Documentary Film Festival, 2007 Iran.
- Nominated for: Cinema Eye Award
for Best Documentary Film, IFC 2009
Festivals
- 36th Rotterdam
International Film Festival, The Netherlands
- 20th International
Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam
IDFA 2007
- 51st Cork
International Film Festival,
Ireland
- 30th Sao
Paulo International Film Festival, Brazil
- 1001 Istanbul
Documentary Film Festival,
Turkey
2007
- Drake International Film Festival, Italy 2007
- 13th Boston Festival of
films from Iran, USA
- CINEMA-VERITE International
documentary film festival, Iran 2007
- Cinema East Film Festival, NY,
USA 2007
- Doc Point Helsinki International Film
Festival 2007
- Ecocinema International Film Festival, Greece 2008
- Human Rights International
Film Festival, Switzerland 2008
- UCLA Iranian Film Festival, USA 2008
- Hot Docs International
Documentary Festival,
Canada
2008
- Planete Doc Review International
Film Festival , Poland 2008
- "Jeu
de pomme" International film festival,France 2007
- "Well-played"
Iran-Arab Film Festival,Germany 2008
- Full Frame International
Documentary Film Festival USA 2008
- "Flandres"
International Film Festival Gent-Belgium 2008
- 15th Alt?nkoza
Film, Culture and Art Festival, Turkey 2008
- Santiago International Film Festival
SANFIC "Jewels of Middle-
East," Chile,
2008
- Morelia International Film Festival, Mexico, 2008
- San Luis Cine International
Festival Competition, Argentina,
November 2008
- Move Media Right Festival. Thailand,
December 2008
- Edinburgh: Film house Cinema, January
2009
- Portland International Film
Festival, Competition, 2009
- All Roads International Film
Festival, Competition ,USA
, 2009
- DOX BOX International
Documentary Film Festival, , Syria, March 2009
- International Urban Film Festival, Iran, March 2009
- Tribeca Film Center, USA, July 2009
- "A Man's Shadow"
Film Festival Int'l Competition, New Caledonia
- November 2009
- AAA/SVA Film, Video and
Multimedia Festival Int'l Competition, Philadelphia
USA,
December 2009
- New voices of Iran, Lincoln Center, NY,
USA,
December 2009
- Best JVF films
in Latin America Tour ,Paraguay, Colombia, Peru, Guatemala,
Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela
2009-10
- Australian
Anthropology Society conference, Sydney, Australia, December 2009
- Big Sky Int'l documentary Film Festival, Montana,
USA,
February 2010
- Documentary Fortnight
Festival, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA, Feb. March 2010
- Best JVF films
in Africa Tour ,Cameroon, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Africa,
Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Senegal, Benin, Ghana ,Burkina Faso
2010-11
Reviews
Director
Massoud Bakhshi and crew are on a mission to make a film about their
hometown, Tehran, but have hit a wall and must explain to their overseers
at the Documentary Film Center why the film will never be completed. They
decide to investigate the city's past in order to better understand the
reason for their predicament. What follows is a sarcastic and comic
narrative about Tehran's
transformation from a small village into a megapolis
of increasing urban mess, pollution, inadequate housing, class gaps and the
fatal destiny of its delicious pomegranates.
Tehran, narrates the
director, was once a small village of fruit bearing gardens and exceptional
pomegranates. Its inhabitants were illiterate, naïve and disease stricken
people. Women were forced into marriage and the city lacked clean drinking
water. Today, he sarcastically states, Tehran is "one of the biggest, most
modern, most orderly, and law-abiding cities of the world".
The city's
air and water are clean, the urban planning is perfect and women determine
their own destinies!
A poll is conducted
among the city's inhabitants and the majority is satisfied. All accept for
Mr. Jafar. Jafar is a new city dweller in
search of a better life in the big city, but has lost his belongings and
has been homeless for three months. Director and crew found him
spontaneously one day while filming on the streets. He contradicts all the
wonderful transformations of the city.
Made over
the span of five years, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates is both homage to
what Tehran
is and a lament for what it could never be. It archives never before seen
footage from 120 years of Iranian history and places it against images of
modern Iran.
The film is, as the introduction declares "a musical, historical,
comedy, docu-drama, love story, experimental
film" that uses style and subject to capture the chaotic and
paradoxical soul of one of the most wonderful cities of the world. It is a
treasure awaiting for those who believe that non-fiction can come in many
guises!
“It's
madness, deconstructing every notion of film, propaganda and history
” — AJ Schnack, "All These
Wonderful Things"
“One
of the most original and innovative films about a city that I've seen in a
while... The film just floods over you — it plays out almost like a
dream!” — Pamela Cohn, Still in Motion
A testimony
of the agitated life in the Iranian capital colored by subtle irony.
Probably the only resource to explain its controversial reality,
modernization attempts ,and the incorporation of western values. Tehran has no more Pomegranates is
far from the type of film that comes to one’s mind when thinking of
Iranian cinema.
Estado de São Paulo
An imaginative and engaging history of Tehran (formerly spelled Teheran),
"Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!" uses a petulant, barbed humor
to show how the city has undergone a sea change to become the capital of
the Islamic Republic of Iran. Young documaker
Massoud Bakhshi doesn't make any earth-shaking revelations, instead
delivering a steady stream of irony about his drastically transformed
society, where even such an apparently harmless topic as change is subject
to state censorship. This is a tasty morsel for fests, expatriate Iranians
and ands attuned to more experimental doc work.
Mockingly,
as though following orders about how the film should be made, Bakhshi continually
contrasts the bad old Teheran full of dirty illiterates with the marvelous
modern city, while images suggest just the opposite.
Deborah Young, Variety
Considering how often it gets mentioned in the international press these
days, Tehran may well have the lowest
recognition value of any major city in the Middle East.
"Egypt" may be
synonymous with pyramids, but reportage from Cairo
tends to trot out the Nile, maybe Tahrir Square,
as visual filler. Now, armchair tourists can fall back on 'Tehran Has No
More Pomegranates!' a profane portrait of the Iranian capital
by writer-director and Tehran
native Massoud Bakhshi.
The film
is oddly successful on two, apparently mutual-exclusive, and fronts. On one
hand it's an intimate representation of an idiosyncratic city. On the
other, it captures strains of Tehran
that will echo in the experiences of urbanites the world over, making this
parochial film a good barometer of 21st-century urbanism.
Jim Quilty,
Daily Star
Tehran Has No More Pomegranates by Massoud Bakhshi
is a special and refreshing documentary. Not a real story, or an upgraded
report, but a cleverly constructed portrait of a city.
Bakhshi
made a smart movie which is dramatic and funny at the same time, which
contains a healthy dose of mockery without being cynical and which is on
top of that imaginative and informative.
Marrigje de Bok, Power off
culture
The filmmaker, Massoud Bakhshi, reviews several centuries of the history of
the Iranian capital Tehran
from various economic, social, cultural, political, environmental, and
architectural perspectives with an irony in terms of words, action and
situations. The film is full of fresh ideas. It has taken the director six
years to make and it is based on the activities of the film crew to collect
evidence and documents to make a film.
Mehrzad Danesh, Film International
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