Sometimes a friend is more unkind than an enemy

Sometimes a friend is more unkind than an enemy.

 Some of the Iranian films makers try to show the cruelty in society

but these people without realizing do not make a good point to the viewer. Rather, they just humiliate the people they are trying to help. When I watched the film “Blackboards,” by Samira Makhmalbaf, I found it was incredibly bad.

The film started with a teacher who wanted to teach people how to read and write. There are several problems with the movie. Firstly, it wasn’t clear where the teacher came from – whether he was working with a development organization or whether he was just trying to find work for himself. Secondly, there is a group of teenagers who are walking in the mountain wilderness and we don’t know where they came from or are going to; what they are carrying; or what has happened to their families and homes. Thirdly, there is a group of old men running and escaping from what seems to be an imaginary danger. They are portrayed as being backward and incompetent. Fourthly, there was only one woman in the group of old people wandering the mountains. She was portrayed as having no common sense at all and her morality was under question (She said, “My heart is like a train with lots of men getting on and getting off”). This felt like an insult to all Kurdish women. Fifthly, the wedding in the film was a farce and the divorce was also so stupid and did not make sense to the viewers.

The most interesting thing is that the teacher himself was not able to read properly and lied about it. When an old man asked him to read a letter for him, he didn’t even know which language the old man’s letter was written in.

Overall, the movie, Blackboards, portrayed the Kurdish people as stupid and hopeless – not just uneducated, but un-teachable and uninterested in learning. Furthermore, it portrayed the “teacher” as a complete idiot who lacked integrity as well as knowledge. To make matters worse, the film seemed to even attack the efforts of education because it presented the attempts at teaching literacy (and numeracy) in a completely inappropriate situation. If this education was to be at all effective, it should be done after some settlement, not as people were running for their lives –dazed and confused. Finally, the Kurdish people were also portrayed as having lost their humanity – not caring about and helping each other

Unfortunately, this movie, like most of the other movies about the Middle East, gives a wrong and destructive impression of the Middle East. It is a tragedy that there are many unbiased or positive movies about the Middle East, but these movies are not available to view or buy in Western countries. It is only these patronizing, propagandist movies that Westerners get to see, thereby reinforcing their prejudices about the Middle East. Thus movie producers such as Samira Makhmalbaf bear a large responsibility for Westerners having wrong information.

By .sanajri Australia