'The Deserted Station' and 'Reyhaneh' screened at MAMI

Mumbai, Mar 15 (UNI) The on-going MAMI festival in the city saw a focus on Iranian filmmaker Alireza Raieesian as two of his great works 'The Deserted Station' and 'Reyahaneh' were screened during the festival.

The filmmaker, who has an equivalent of a doctorate in cinema, is also known for his association with Abbas Kiarostami, the master who put Iranian cinema on the international map.

Raieesian's most admired film 'The Deserted Station', screened here last night, is about a photographer and his wife a school teacher who are stranded when their transport breaks down on a cross country journey to Teheran. The photographer seeks help at a nearby village and comes across a teacher who offers help. Whilst the two men go off to find a spare part the wife takes over a class in the village school.

According to experts and film analysts,'' The cosmopolitan urbanites, relatively helpless without their vehicles imbibe the poetic mystical force of their rural hosts' belief as well as their 'can do' practicality. And the children, though impoverished and forgotten by the world at large, have much to teach the woman who spends her day with them, their urgent needs distracting her from a sense of loss. Under Raieesian's sensitive direction, these stories are revealed using indirect cues and making most of the locations unearthly beauty.'' His other film 'Reyhaneh', is about a lonely woman totally cut off from her past who returns to her hometown to start a new life.

She is forced to stay in her old family house in which her brother lives in destitution. But Reyhaneh's brother finds his sister's presence in the house unbearable and begins to make her life miserable. Reyhaneh goes to live with her sister but once again she is treated as unwelcomed.

About the film, experts say, ''The study of a woman's loneliness out of disconnection with people who are supposed to be close to her is almost radical. Raieesian does not flaunt radicalism in your face, he lets it seep into you through evocative use of spaces and silences.'' UNI