A note that appears on screen at the beginning of Baran says 1.4 million refugees from Afghanistan are living in Iran. That number has probably decreased recently, but the fate of the Afghans who have fled 20 years of war and deprivation is still relevant. Our lives and theirs, separated by geographical distance, cultural differences and almost unimaginable material disparities, seem much closer now than they might have a few years ago.
But even without the grimly fortuitous topicality conferred by Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, Baran, the film from the Iranian director Majid Majidi, would be necessary viewing. Not only does it bring news of a faraway place, but it also exemplifies the power of cinema, when it focuses on the particulars of daily life, to achieve a paradoxical universality. The film plunges you into a reality that is, more often than not, difficult and sad, and then, without sentimentalizing it or denying its brutality, transforms that reality into a lyrical and celebratory vision.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HWA JAAN
Majidi's hero is a young laborer named Latif (Hossein Abedini) who fetches groceries and serves tea at a construction site where many of the laborers are Afghan emigres working illegally. After one is injured, his son arrives to take his place. Too weak to haul heavy sacks of plaster or perform other arduous tasks, the newcomer soon replaces Latif, who resents losing his relatively easy job. Before long -- though long after the audience is likely to reach the same conclusion -- he discovers that the new boy is actually a girl named Baran (Zahra Bahrami), and he commences an awkward, earnest courtship.
Majidi, whose Color of Paradise is the highest-grossing Iranian film released in the US, has a populist, romantic streak that distinguishes him from some of his more austere colleagues. At times -- especially when Latif and Baran, in alternating close-ups, exchange wordless, soulful glances, their faces lighted with an orange glow that seems to emanate from within -- he sends out a flash of sublimated sensuality that evokes old Hollywood or modern Bollywood.
His willingness to risk hokiness -- his delight, really, in portraying strong, naive emotions -- does not so much subvert the movie's realism as intensify it. Latif's impulsive, sometimes ridiculous infatuation is the stuff of romantic comedy, but Majidi uses the sweet spell of a love story to work a more complex magic.
The young man's desire to protect the honor of his beloved and his fantasy of rescuing her from her miserable circumstances (she lives with other refugees in a makeshift encampment) lead him, through the awakening of his immature, unthinking ardor, to a moral transformation. He changes before our eyes from a clownish, hotheaded boy into a noble, self-sacrificing man. His feeling for Baran precipitates the discovery that other people exist; his passion becomes compassion.
The lovely clarity of this story, which seems to have been drawn from the literature of an earlier age, is well served by the artful subtlety of the telling. Majidi prefers imagery to exposition, and his shots are as dense with meaning, and as readily accessible, as Dutch paintings.
The cavernous, half-open construction site, often shot from above, looks like a Bruegel composition: a field of dark, flat, earthy tones teeming with clusters of color and activity. Often the director follows a glowing close-up with a wide shot, and the juxtaposition of perspectives produces a powerful sense of human scale that perfectly expresses his ethical insight.
When their faces fill the screen, Latif and Baran -- and also his co-workers and her hard-hit relatives -- are universes unto themselves. Seen from afar, they are small and vulnerable, tiny bees in a vast, impersonal hive. At the beginning of Baran you are asked to contemplate numbers; leaving the theater, you are likely to be haunted by faces.
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS