Niloofar: moving story examines ideals of honour, tradition and predestination

 Sabine el Gemayel, “Niloofar” (2008)

That familiar maxim “Less is more” applies as much to making movies as it does in composing music and creating other works in so many areas of art and literature. French-Lebanese director Sabine el Gemayel presents what looks like a simple and straightforward story in her debut directorial effort. An Iranian tribal village girl, Niloofar (Mobina Aynehdar), wants to learn reading and writing so she can go to the city and train to be a doctor. Her family has other plans for her: her mum (Roya Nownahali), the village midwife, needs a successor and Niloofar, her only daughter, is the logical choice; and her father, Abdollah (Sadegh Safai), needing to support two wives and their children, has agreed to trade Niloofar in marriage to Sheikh Abbas (Amir Aghai) who will split his property between himself and Abdollah once a council bridge over the land is completed. In the meantime, Niloofar takes lessons with a friend from a teacher known only as Banoo (Fatemah Motamed-Aria); in her leisure time, Niloofar chats to her uncle Aziz (Shahab Hosseini) and reads constantly. Time flies by: Sheikh Abbas gets impatient and leans on Abdollah to hand over Niloofar who must surely have reached puberty; the mother worries that Niloofar hasn’t started menstruating (with help from the second wife the girl has been hiding evidence of bleeding) and isn’t interested in midwife duties; and Niloofar is despondent and depressed, becoming more so when news reaches her that Sheikh Abbas allowed his own daughter to die in an honour killing. She goes to Uncle Aziz for help. The young man, remembering a girl he once tried to help and failed, is moved by Niloofar’s plea and hatches a plan.

“Niloofar” is a very moving story in its structure: it has humanity and urges compassion for people who find themselves in difficult situations which they try to deal with using what they know and have but come up against customs and traditions that limit their options. Into this story is woven an examination of concepts of honour, tradition and belief in predestination: that God has already determined a person’s path in life and the person must follow it in faith. As the movie progresses, the various characters who include Aziz’s fortune-teller grandmother start questioning in their own way what these concepts mean to them, especially in relation to Niloofar’s pending marriage. Abdollah is assailed by complaints from his wife that he didn’t consult her about horse-trading Niloofar; Aziz tells him that even the Prophet Mohammad consulted his daughter Fatima as to whether she wanted to marry and whom; and other characters tell him he’s going against God’s will in marrying his teenage daughter off to a much older man. El Gemayel shows the burden of family and tribal honour weighs as heavily on the men as it does on women, and how it traps families in dilemmas in which doing the “right thing” can end up tormenting them psychologically. Abdollah looks more and more like a trapped rat in a mess that’s partly his fault. After discovering that Niloofar has run away from home, the extended family gathers to discuss how to get her back and what should be done with her. Sheikh Abbas confesses to being troubled by his daughter’s death long ago and tries to plead clemency for Niloofar. The village elder decides on what to do with Niloofar; her father quickly falls in line with the decision while her mother, perhaps mindful of the fortune-teller’s advice about allowing a finger of hers to go away but still believing in the old customs and respecting the advice of the elder, steadily crumbles into tears.

The plot progresses steadily with a build-up in tension to two high points: one where Niloofar must decide whether to follow Aziz in hiding in a bus, the other where her brother finds her in a back-room at a town grocery and tells her he’s been ordered to kill her if she doesn’t return with him to the village. The increase in tension is relentless and conveys perfectly Niloofar’s growing despair and the worry and inner turmoil experienced by people close to her. The plot seems real enough up to the moment where the brother is forced by the family into travelling on his own into town and finding Niloofar: sending a child to fetch and kill the girl doesn’t seem credible at all. I imagine that in real life, the village would send two adult male relatives to get Niloofar and Aziz. It’s possible that the family, by sending a boy rather than a man or two men, is giving Niloofar a chance of escape while keeping the appearance of fulfilling tribal custom. The more realistic explanation is that Abdollah has no other close male relatives to do the job for him. At least the film ends on a hopeful note with Niloofar pitying her brother as she prepares to leave with Aziz for Tehran. The ending is deliberately left uncertain so that there’s the possibility that she changes her mind and returns home with her brother.

“Niloofar” is so naturalistic in its filming that it has a slight documentary feel. The documentary impression is especially strong in scenes that take in the landscapes around the village: el Gemayel uses many fixed-camera shots that show the characters at some distance though there are many close-up shots of Niloofar and others. The village scenes are very colourful and female characters especially wear bright clothing that contrast with the desert surrounds. There is a memorable sequence early in the film in which Niloofar and her mother help a woman give birth in a river; underwater shots of the woman’s clothed body and the baby floating in the water have a glowing, radiant quality. The effect of el Gemayel’s filming decisions and methods enables some distance between the viewer and the characters so that viewers can see the wider socio-cultural context in which people operate and how their beliefs and traditions limit their choices and decision-making and cause them anguish and sorrow. Although characters act in ways against their own interests and appear weak, stupid and vacillating, viewers are encouraged not to condemn them for what they do.

Though the film was made in Iran with Iranian actors, many of whom must have been amateurs with no prior acting experience, no clerics appear and Islam isn’t mentioned except as an excuse to justify folk beliefs. That’s sure to make non-Muslim Western viewers wonder just how much the name of Islam is used and abused by people, innocently sometimes, not so innocently other times, to support and force conformity with ideas, beliefs and customs that aren’t in the spirit of the religion.

“Niloofar” is a very moving film: it urges compassion for people caught in difficult situations who must make decisions affecting themselves and others but are subject to strict rules and expectations that make knowing what decisions to take. Is it any wonder that people end up making decisions that cause grief and regret for the rest of their lives?

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