John DeFore / hollywoodreporter.com, A Cinema of Discontent: Montreal Review

The Bottom Line

Entertaining and informative doc will be an eye-opener for many.

Jamsheed Akrami itemizes the way censors shape today's Iranian cinema.

MONTREAL – Less a history of post-Revolution Iranian cinema than an assessment of the ways artists have been hobbled by censorship, Jamsheed Akrami's A Cinema of Discontent pairs plentiful interviews with thorough illustrations of the censors' most troublesome demands. Both enriching for those who follow Iranian film closely and an eye-opener for less worldly film buffs, the doc could attract a modest audience at art houses and should have legs on home video.

On one hand, the film explains how some things a first-time viewer might take to represent simple cultural differences are something much stranger: After a newbie-friendly definition of the hijab, narrator Sara Nodjoumi explains that no, Iranian women don't wear those head scarves within their homes -- and certainly don't wear them to bed, the bath, or (!) while blow-drying their hair, as we see them do here in an assortment of films.

Censors simply won't abide any representation of domestic scenes that expose parts of a woman or male/female contact that the stricter members of society wouldn't be comfortable with on a public street. So kissing is forbidden, even when it's thoroughly non-sexual; under no circumstances must a woman dance or be heard singing, even if the film's picture shows her moving her mouth to the music we hear.

Through a wealth of film clips reaching back decades, we see that commercial films typically roll with the goofiness of these constraints while art-film directors write around them, limiting the kinds of stories they can tell because they refuse to bowdlerize the drama.

Akrami offers clips of some creative workarounds for our amusement -- as when a proud father goes to hug the bride on her wedding day, and the camera transforms her into a child, lest the audience be shocked at a grown woman being touched by a man. More seriously, he explores how some of the tendencies admirers think of as integral to Iranian cinema -- minimalism, the "aesthetics of omission" -- are directly related to limitations placed on artists.

An impressive number of those film artists are interviewed here, from Bahman Ghobadi -- who describes being an Iranian filmmaker as "torture" -- to A Separation director Asghar Farhadi, who acknowledges that every now and then -- in Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly, for example -- he can stage a forbidden scene in such an emotionally involving way that the censors forget their job and let him get away with it.

Production Company: Jam-Hi

Director-Screenwriter-Editor-Producer: Jamsheed Akrami

Directors of photography: Andrew Blum, Jamsheed Akrami

Music: Rouzbeh E.

No rating, 85 minutes

Source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/a-cinema-discontent-montreal-review-620745