3 Faces

A slow-burning, but humoristic and highly enjoyable meditation on artists’, and especially women’s lack of expressive freedom.

The screening of 3 Faces is subtitled in Norwegian.

3 Faces is the story of three actresses and one filmmaker. «Face» number one, a young girl from a faraway mountain village, wants to become an actress against her family’s wishes. She sends a desperate video message to Behnaz Jafari, a famous Iranian actress, in which she appears to attempt suicide. Has the young girl really killed herself? The actress is terribly shocked and worried, but also suspects trickery. She asks her friend Jafar Panahi for help, and together they decide to go look for the young girl in her faraway mountain village, at the Turkish-Iranian border.

Up in the mountains, the villagers seem to exist in a separate era, and follow their own, slow tempo. Jafar and Behnaz hear about a third actress, who has moved to the village and lives there in isolation…

Its elliptical and allegoric style, in addition to its use of the beautiful but austere mountainous Iranian countryside as backdrop, makes this film an homage to the newly departed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s early filmography. With this fourth «forbidden» meta film, following This is Not a Film, Closed Curtain and Taxi Teheran, Jafar Panahi produces a slow-burning, but humoristic and highly enjoyable meditation on artists’, and especially women’s lack of expressive freedom.

Cato Fossum (Films from the South 2018)

Director

Jafar Panahi is one of the leading contemporary Iranian filmmakers, winning wide-ranging international recognition and numerous prizes from major festivals for his films The White Balloon (1995), The Circle (2000), Offside (2006), Taxi Tehran (2015) and 3 Women (2018). His films combine neorealist aesthetics with biting humor and social commentary, with notable focus on the situation of Iranian women. Despite being banned from filmmaking by Iranian authorities since 2010 and living under house arrest for periods of time, he has continued making and distributing films. His most recent film, No Bears, premiered at the film festival in Venice this year.

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