20 Fingers

A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.

Mania Akbari collaborates with British sculptor Douglas White to coin a tender fusion of langauge, where a meeting of cinema and sculpture investigates the processes of physical and psychological destruction and renewal. Begun a matter of weeks after first meeting, the film charts a deepening artistic and personal relationship exploring the nature of skin, family, death, water, desire and, throughout, a powerful will to form. Akbari looks into the connection between her body and the political history of Iran, investigating the relationship between her own physical traumas and the collective political memory of her birthplace. As she undergoes surgeries on a body decimated by cancer, remembrance and reconstruction provide a framework for investigating how bodies are traumatised, censored and politicized, and yet ultimately remain a site of possibility.

An epistolary feature film: a cinematic discourse between a British director Mark Cousins, and an Iranian actress and director Mania Akbari which extends the concept of "essay film" with startling confrontations in the arenas of cultural issues, gender politics and differing artistic sensibilities. A unique journey into the minds of two exceptional filmmakers which becomes a love affair on film.

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed.

In a society where all social customs are based on the beauty of a woman, her challenge is to find self confidence and inner beauty despite having lost her physical beauty.

Three attempts at reconnecting with often traumatic pasts, all leading to flights from home and the need for personal reinvention. A documentary triptych of many layers and emotions, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected ways.

Like a trauma therapist, the camera accompanies Javad Soleimani whose wife, Elnaz Nabiyi, was killed aboard flight PS752 after missile attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Javad's personal and political memories are interwoven as the camera crew and his friends follow him through the complex labyrinth of healing and mourning. Javad's fury and sorrow is gradually geared towards a loud cry for justice.

Mania Akbari’s From Tehran to London (2012), has a Russian-doll structure. It begins with Akbari shooting her latest film entitled Women Do Not Have Breasts about a couple, the young poet and writer Ava and her upper-class older husband Ashkan, who live in a large, beautiful – yet isolated – house in the hilly outskirts of the city. Household workers Maryam and Rahim attend to their needs. But despite their comfortable lives, Ava is increasingly dissatisfied and estranged in her relationship with Ashkan. What seems to have been an exciting relationship in the past is now little more than a series of mutual reproaches, as Ashkan incessantly tries to change Ava into someone she isn’t – a dutiful wife.

Prominent filmmaker, artist and actress Mania Akbari reclaims her body—and that of all the other women in Iranian film. Using almost a hundred excerpts spanning Iran's film history, from the silent era to just after the Islamic Revolution—films that have all since been banned—she tells a story of liberation, exploitation, emancipation and ultimately oppression.