"Nafas"; A Little Girl, Revolution, and War

"Nafas" is the third feature film by Narges Abyar, which won the Best Director award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia on Saturday, bringing recognition to Iranian cinema. The film is based on a theme that has recently provoked reactions and sometimes confusion among various political factions in Iran. Abyar, whose previous film "Shiyar 143" was endorsed by conservatives as a "value-based" film, now clearly attempts to avoid political positioning in her latest work. The film recounts three years of a little girl's life during a critical period in Iran's history: life during the Shah, the events of the revolution, and the onset of war. The entire film is narrated from the perspective of this girl; therefore, rather than pursuing an overt political direction, it seeks to depict the innocent world of a child, which ultimately is shattered by the violent realities of adults. Abyar, who has spent years as a novelist, adapted this film from one of her stories; however, "Nafas" remains more indebted to literature than to cinema. The film's most significant issue arises from this: everything is summarized in words, in the narrations that outline the main character's childlike world, but it seems the images are merely an additional element created later for these narrations; meaning that the narration does not serve the image, but rather the image serves the narration to tell its story in a novelistic manner. As a result, the film is clearly not visually engaging, and the wandering camera and continuous cuts do not help to conceal the film's flawed mise-en-scène. The film's reliance on dialogue is such that if someone does not follow the endless narrations, they will grasp almost nothing from the film. On the other hand, the narrative structure is fragmented, and its various sections are hard to connect. Some parts could easily be removed, and others could be shortened or even lengthened without any significant change to the film's structure. "Nafas" is clearly not a character-driven film and does not intend to analyze the adult characters' psychology for us; thus, it does not provide an explanation for the grandmother's behavior, which sometimes goes beyond the usual and acceptable limits with her punishments and curses. It also does not aim to be a film about poverty and does not examine its impoverished characters within the social context. The film's perspective is more of an internal one, seeking only to examine childlike innocence against the surrounding events; events in which this child plays no role and is merely an observer, yet is inevitably affected by them. The film's lack of political positioning stems from this point; since the perspective of the story is from a child's viewpoint, any stance for or against the events seems meaningless. Thus, the filmmaker can hide her political stance behind the main character, but the cinematic structure of the film does not allow her to conceal herself in other aspects. "Nafas" clearly reflects Abyar's perspective, which is entirely reliant on literature and her background as a storyteller, rather than that of a cinema lover or critic. From the first shot until just before the last sequence, the viewer is bombarded with information that the filmmaker wants to convey through the main character's words. This volume of information is such that at the beginning of the film, following the characters and their relationships becomes difficult. As the tangents fade away, we are left with the main character, but strangely, the process of injecting information continues, and the viewer has no opportunity to digest it – or find a perspective – until the last scene, where a miracle occurs: a beautiful cinematic scene finally takes shape, and the angle of the camera and the atmosphere, without resorting to words, juxtapose the violence of the world against the innocence and simplicity of a little girl's world, without the need for slogans.