A Look at Bonyad-e Mostazafan Industries

Waiting for Godot on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf, an island where decay and luxury life are neighbours. A man in his eighties believes that he is still in charge of a complex for alternative forms of energy which was abolished long ago. The pictures - an homage to the late and famous Iranian director Sohrab Shahid-Saless - contrast the comment speaking about the perspectives for a great future.

A dialogue-free film that follows a boy in southern Iran whose daily chore is bringing an elegant glass bowl to get filled with ice, and then returning home.

Initially banned for seven years, the film treats the questionable and controversial newspaper story of a heroic village boy who prevented a train disaster as an antiauthoritarian, Rashomon-like puzzle.

The film recounts the life of the prisoners and the problems their families encounter in their struggle to survive. Here again filmmaker Kamran Shirdel employs the cinema verité style. The interviews with the prisoners, social workers and teachers serve as commentaries for "constructed" documentary images.

A free adaptation from Godard's Breathless that follows Amir, a foul guy who has killed a man in Abadan. He returns to Tehran and continuing his misdeeds trying to convince his girlfriend Zarry to escape with him to the south of Iran.

Tehran Is the Capital of Iran (1966-79) documents life in a deprived district in the south of Tehran. The images of destitution in Tehran's poor areas is accompanied by a variety of spoken accounts: the official viewpoint on the district's living conditions, what the inhabitants have to say, and occasional extracts read out of school manuals. The key element in Shirdel's film is the counterpoint effect he creates with image and sound. His impressively powerful portrayal of social unease helps reinforce the impact of his astonishing documentary images and social themes.

The film shows the life of prostitutes in Tehran's city brothels, an area known as Shahre Now. The film closely follows a number of women and communicates how the burden of social constraints led them to surrender in the face of their common fate. The film does explore the possibility of re-education and development for these women, but in no way does it paint over the hard and brutal reality. The film was produced on behalf of the Organization of Iranian Women and was immediately banned while shooting was still going on. After the revolution, a portion of the material was found, and Shirdel decided to finish the film using photos by the late Kaveh Golestan that were taken more than ten years after the film itself was shot.

"I have not been very active as a social filmmaker anymore after the revolution, though I had great plans and projects at the start of the revolution! So far I have made many so-called commissioned industrial films for national oil, gas, and steel companies as well as for government ministries, in which I tried to bring the films as close as possible to my taste and to my way of thinking and make the films' sponsors to see the world from content and formal viewpoints. Some of these films encountered serious censorship problems and part of them were cut for their public screenings, such as Gas, Fire, Wind and The Genaveh Project, both of which were filmed during the Iran-Iraq war." - Kamran Shirdel

Shirdel made a fertile production of highly praised industrial and educational films. "Wagon Pars" is a fine example of his industrial documentaries.

Short documentary about the Paykan automobile assembly-line

Cradle of Sun

Kamran Shirdel's 1964 diploma film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Rome unfolds in an urban apartment with a despondent man, who appears to be an artist or a writer, contemplating his existence through mirrors set about the room. Featuring the music of Anton Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra Opus 6, the film has no dialogue. Gli Specchi, also known as The Mirrors, was made in the same period that saw Shirdel working as an assistant director for John Huston on The Bible and it went on to win the diploma of honor in the World Cinema School Film Festival in Tokyo in 1965.

Genaveh Project

The film's story is about a school that is expecting the arrival of an inspector, and everyone is anxious about the inspector’s visit. This film is a loose adaptation of The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol.