Ayneh (1997) (aka The Mirror)
Jafar Panahi
Persian
“I’m not acting anymore.”
Iranian cinema has been getting a lot of attention in this first decade of the new century and rightly so. The contribution of stalwarts like Abbas Kiarostami is being progressively applauded with Kiarostami himself being called as the unofficial leader of the whole movement. And if we jot down the names of the most vital of his Iranian contemporaries, we would almost instantly arrive at one name that has been surprising the audience with the sheer power of the films he has been creating with shocking consistency – Jafar Panahi. The charming The White Balloon (1995) put him on the world cinema map firmly and films like The Circle (2000) just added to his glory. But a quiet little film that he made in between these two films, Ayneh (1997), is one that has intrigued me for years and has made me return to it multiple times.
January 16, 2009 at 10:07 pm
A good post on Iranian Cinema. The two movies Jafa Panahi and The White balloon are the famous iranian movies.
Thanks
Kate
November 22, 2009 at 3:54 pm
[...] other – using both the film within the film and its making-of. As it turns out in Panahi’s The Mirror (1997), reality deviates as significantly from fiction as it resembles it (The mystic kid seems, in [...]