Director: Ali Sabokbar
Writer: Ali Sabokbar
Cast: Pegah Kanedykey, Atefeh Badypa, Omid Barzegar, Mojtaba Bromandian, Mohammad Javad Namnik
Running time: 10mins
Running a film festival is expensive – and it often means that organisations struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees the only source of revenue that many festivals can rely on, that can make granting waivers difficult – resulting in filmmakers who already struggle to have their voices heard being further marginalised.
Stories told by artists from low-income backgrounds, opposition groups hit by censorship, or individuals in nations subjected to international sanctions still need a platform. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a fourth season.
Over the current run of matinees, IFL will showcase work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free communication of political and social issues.
The second film in our free-to-view programme comes from Ali Sabokbar, a filmmaker based in Tehran. Dirty Water takes place in an abstract dreamscape, where a poor mother and her child struggle to find water.
The film is unclear about when or where specifically it takes place – but this kind of nightmarish world is usually the preserve of dystopian fiction. There is no water, except for a few dwindling wells where small amounts of water escape from cracks in the ground. It is there that the final remnants of humanity squabble for the most precious resource, as they look to cling to life for another day.
In this world, society’s most vulnerable are left to fight for themselves along with everyone else – with Sabokbar depicting one particularly unpleasant quarrel between a child and a disabled adult. Credited as ‘Disabled Man’, Mohammad Javad Namnik’s performance is not a particularly sympathetic turn, playing upon some unhelpfully animalistic stereotypes that have long been used to belittle people with learning disabilities in particular. However, in a wider world where everyone is basically reduced to primal violence, it arguably says less about the writer-director’s attitudes toward the disabled community than it does about human nature as a whole.
Amid this, ‘Mother’ (Pegah Kanedykey) trudges through seemingly endless sand-wastes, scratching in the top-soil in a vain hope of striking on some untapped spring. When a cart pulls into view, holding many huge jugs of water, it seems that her salvation may be at hand – until closer inspection reveals it is being pulled by a ragged, desperate man, being flogged mercilessly by an unblemished merchant. It’s a piece of imagery which has turned up in more than one Iranian short covered by IFL – see The Horse – and, rather than being a warning of a horrific future awaiting us, hints at a satirical iconography that is rooted firmly in the present day.
While he has more than enough to go around, the merchant (Mojtaba Bromandian) coldly refuses to distribute it, without receiving some sort of reimbursement. And with no money to speak of, Mother is left to weigh up an unspoken number of other ‘payments’ if she and her infant child are to see the light of another day.
After the second half of the film unfolds, the film concludes with a caption, alleging that all this abstract imagery is ‘based on a true story’. Reflexively, it is easy to wave this away, particularly from the perspective of a Western cinema-goer, where ridiculous narratives have often been passed off by opportunistic executives as ‘true stories’ for shock value – in the style of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Fourth Kind. At the same time, from that perspective, droughts and scarcity are the preserve of the future because the Hollywood elite can’t fathom that people do live with those horrors now. Sometimes, those people are as nearby as a sidewalk, across the street from the Academy Awards.
The fact is that while we might be trained to see Dirty Water as futuristic, it is a future that has already arrived for countless people around the world. Even if we don’t take the drought literally, huge numbers of people have continued to live in hunger, and starve to death, in the last century – despite the world producing enough food for 10 billion people.
The merchant in Dirty Water represents a class which has manufactured this scarcity in a time of abundance. Because he actually knows where there is enough water for everyone – but maintains a property claim to it, which prevents anyone from accessing something that is necessary to their very survival.
This is predicated on dominant ideology, which teaches us as a species that commodifying the necessities of life for profit is natural, that permanently based private property is natural, and that these systems of living have always been, and therefore always must be; if they crumble, so does every essence of our understanding of the world. In other words, we believe the world will end. But Dirty Water counters that, by suggesting that these same assumptions and resulting power-inequalities are precisely what is already ending millions of worlds.
It is an interesting watch – particularly as it manages to skewer hierarchical authorities from a country where censorship and state-interference with the arts remains common, deploying experimental cinema and politicised imagery to meet those ends. At the same time, it is not an especially easy watch – not only because of its arguably problematic depiction of disabilities, but because the majority of the film is soundtracked by the whimpering and sobbing of abused women and children. Some of this might push it into didactic territory, where audiences may feel put off simply because they are obviously being preached to.
The film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 20th of January, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. Viewers will also be invited to rate the film out of five, to help determine the winner of this Saturday Matinees season.
As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE2324 to access the film.
Stay tuned for another film next week!