"The White Meadows" Movie Review

A salted symbolism seems to evaporate off the screen in Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's "The White Meadows". Rasoulof, who wrote, directed and produced "The White Meadows", is closely associated to the Iranian New Wave Movement of Cinema. The film was awarded the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for Best Feature at the 2010 Denver Film Festival.

"The White Meadows" was edited by one of the Iranian New Wave's most prominent figures, Jafar Panahi. Along with "The White Meadows" cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafori, Rasoulof and Panahi were arrested by Iranian authorities on March 1, 2010. In this review of the film, there is just no way for me to tackle the complex web of issues surrounding Iran's oppression of its artists.

That said, as with several Iranian films, the suppressed freedom to express art and ideas in Iran hold an elemental place in "The White Meadows". Rasoulof's tale goes beyond the neorealist qualities so often described in Iranian New Wave Cinema. The film is vividly real in its humanistic portrayals and natural landscapes, but under the folkloric lens of Rasoulof, Panahi and Ghafori it drifts into magic-realism.

"The White Meadows" recently screened at the 33rd Denver Film Festival as part of their Focus on Iranian Cinema. As Artistic Director of the Festival, Brit Withey chose to show a clip from "The White Meadows" when programmers sat on the "Hot Seat" panel. He also listed the film within his top ten picks for the festival in the Westword. Hopefully, audiences reaped what Withey saw in this breathtaking postcard from a land most foreign from America.

The film's narrative floats behind the character of Rahmat, as he makes his mysterious rounds by rowboat on Lake Urmia. This desolate body is the largest lake in the Middle-East and third largest salt water lake in the world; yet, seems like nothing on this planet. The weary red and foggy blue hues captured by Ebrahim Ghafori create a mystical island of suffering, adrift in a vastness of possibility. Rahmat has a medicine-man like persona; a messenger of fate and collector of tears; quite literally. Hopping from one salt encrusted island to the next, Rahmat routinely captures the willing tears of its inhabitants. He is greeted expectantly, as the black-cloaked inhabitants drift like ghosts on the islands, like teardrops of ink on sheets of frozen mist.

Filling his glass urn of teardrops, the islanders' unfolding dramas and oddities crop up like the salt formations they live on, only to fade hauntingly as Rahmat rows onto the next. Without mentioning a spoiler, his voyage upon Lake Urmia concludes in a mysterious, wondrously open-ended opportunity for viewer interpretation. What is certain in "The White Meadows" is the suffering of the inhabitants; perhaps an allegory for Iran's post- revolutionary stagnation. Like the lake's salt formations, the story's construction is an elemental chemistry. The composite is simple, yet visually complex as it takes shape in the shadows of meaning their silhouettes reveal in the ever-changing light of day.

The Island's inhabitants frequently mention a desire to journey beyond the Lake, "where the sea is not so salty". As elemental as Salt is, its symbolism brings out the vivid flavors that surface for Rasoulof's masterful storytelling. As author Mark Kurlansky wrote in his book Salt: A World History, "Loyalty and friendship are sealed with salt because its essence does not change. Even dissolved into liquid, salt can be evaporated back into square crystals. In both Islam and Judaism, salt seals a bargain because it is immutable..."

For the populace of "The White Meadows", their bargain seems a raw deal. It is a fate sealed by dogmatic entrapment through preserved ritual and tradition. Their only liberation is that blink of horizon where the turmoil of navigating the sea meets the ungraspable sky. Rahmat seems to be the only one capable of navigating this sea, but as we see he is only the messenger of yet another teardrop in its vastness.