"About Eli"

The movie “About Eli” from Iran directed by Asghar Farhadi received the silver bear award of Berlin International Film Festival. The movie is about the normal life of ordinary people in Iran. I like the fact that European movies in contrary to Hollywood movies are about the art of cinema. Even the people who attend in the festival wear ordinary clothes. Women are simple and try to benefit their natural beauty instead of trying to look like models.

Recently, I saw the Hollywood movie of Slumdog Millionaire, based on an Indian story. Too much exaggeration, duality, unreality, lack of a cohesive playwright were the features of this movie. I don’t know why characters in Indian movies are all heroes. They all lose a family member in childhood and find it later in a country of 1,147,995,904 population. Juxtaposition of poor and rich, group Indian dancing at the end and lots of clichés in different shapes are inseparable parts of these movies.

When I was living in Calgary, I always had long discussions with my roommate Olga about the similarities of art, cinema and literature in Russia and Iran. We always agreed that social pressure and inequality can raise genius people in art. I don’t mean that is good to have pressure, but Olga was saying that Russia had its best literature and performing arts just a few years before the collapse of the communist society. This fact was also depicted very well in the movie “The Lives of Others”.