Black Knight, The first feature film by director Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi, who has been living in France for several years, portrays the idleness of youth. The film, which was released in France as young Iranians revolted against the regime, won the Grand Prix at the Premiers Plans festival in Angers and the Gold Star at the Marrakech International Film Festival.
Iman is an idle young Iranian living in Shemroon, a neighborhood overlooking Tehran. Brawler, driven by an urgency to live and get out of precariousness, he crisscrosses the city on his powerful motorcycle. The film is very current, contrary to what the title, Black Knight, might suggest. Director Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi wanted to give a symbolic dimension to the main character of the film. ” In the story I was telling, there was mythological potential. The two brothers, who live in the north of Tehran, it looked like a castle. I wanted to make a contemporary film, but with the codes of medieval films “, he explains.
Show Iranian society
A dark modern knight, Iman takes advantage of his contacts with Iran’s golden youth to make easy money. One thing leading to another, he will deal cocaine, flirting with danger and delinquency. The director uses this universe to make the different Iranian social classes coexist. ” It’s quite expensive in fact, so suddenly it’s not accessible to the middle or poor classes. It is a reality that exists. Me, I used it precisely to navigate to the frontier of middle classes or former bourgeoisies that were in the process of disappearing. »
Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi left Iran twenty years ago. But it captures the atmosphere of Tehran well. The worry, for example, of a mother who is worried about seeing her daughter, who has returned for a few days from abroad, going out in an outfit that could get her into trouble. A premonitory sequence, shot several months before the “Woman, Life, Freedom. » « But that doesn’t mean we saw things in advance, says the filmmaker. That is the daily life of all women in Iran. Finally, it was, it had been like that for a long time. »
Several young people living together
So many details, representations of youth, that we are not used to seeing in Iranian cinema. ” I wanted to make a movie that I wanted to see, justifies Emad Aleebrahm Dehkordi. I always remember when I was 20, 21 in Iran, I was a fan of Kiarostami and later Panahi, Rasoulof… But each time, I said to myself: but sometimes also, I want to see a film whose characters are the same age as me. »
As young people revolt against the regime and repression intensifies in Iran, Black Knight shows several young people who coexist: whether you are powerful or miserable, downgraded in Tehran or in exile abroad, the prospects for the future are obviously not the same.
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