Director: Ahmad Salehi
Writer: Ahmad Salehi
Running time: 8mins
Film festivals are expensive – and so they often struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees often posing as the only dependable source of revenue that many festivals have access to, that can make granting waivers difficult.
Stories told by artists working on a shoe-string budget, or who are hit by censorship, or subjected to international sanctions, still need a platform, though. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a fifth season.
Over this most recent run of matinees, IFL is showcasing work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free and easy communication of their artistic or political visions.
The fourth film in our free-to-view programme is The Last Friend, by Iran-based filmmaker Ahmad Salehi. A tonally dissonant short, it follows the escapades of a bungling car-thief, who accidentally steals a vehicle with a baby in the backseat.
The revelation comes after what appears to be a deadly serious opening, in which a moody-looking man drives around a rainy street, before unexpectedly exiting the driver’s seat, dashing across the busy road, never to be seen again. A masked man, seeing the keys in the ignition, jumps in, and the moody-rainy-driving sequence resumes – before babbling comes from the back seat. The reveal of the giggling baby is such a jarring shift in tone that it can only be read as a comedic beat; something which is emphasised when the exasperated car-thief takes an exaggerated sniff of the car’s interior, and makes a hurried trip to a store to buy diapers – while piano music reminiscent of a silent slapstick film plays.
The thief, also played by the film’s writer-director, then goes through a short montage sequence where he seems to bond with the child. And while he has (unintentionally) gone from car-thief to child-abductor in the eyes of the law, he seems resigned to care for the child. Perhaps, we think, he will hatch a mad-cap plan to return the car, and the child, to the father-of-the-year candidate who absent-mindedly abandoned them in the first place…
No, there’s another jarring shift in tone coming – in which a film that delivers so many strange and goofy turns suddenly decides to have a Ken Loach ending. And not one which makes a lot of sense, either. The thing that is perhaps most disappointing with that is not that either comedy or grim social realism are bad ideas in their own right, or that the filmmaker does a bad job in either constituent part (and his acting in both is solid). It’s that they don’t work well together, potentially leaving audiences unsure of how to feel about what they have seen.
That being said, you may disagree with me. And if you do, please let me know via tomorrow’s rating poll.
The film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 14th of February, 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 IFLMATINEE26 to access the film.
Stay tuned for our final film next week!