The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 18-24
The Brick and the Mirror (1965)
Directed by Ebrahim Golestan
A young taxi driver (Zackaria Hashemi) in mid-1960s Tehran discovers one night that a baby girl has been abandoned in his cab. His efforts to find a home for the child lead him into an existential confrontation with his girlfriend (Taji Ahmadi)—who believes that they should keep and raise her as a family—and into encounters with myriad despondent figures representing different sectors of Iranian society. The journey that the film’s main characters take over 24 hours becomes a social portrait filled with isolated, seemingly parentless people. “The Brick and the Mirror is a profoundly inspiring film that masterfully blends realism and metaphor, social criticism and poetry, grief and humor,” says the teacher and filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa about Golestan’s first feature, which will screen in a new digital restoration. “Golestan created an allegory of a country on the verge of collapse. The film’s virtues include a female protagonist who is strong, fearless, and loving, something rarely seen in Iranian film history. This film has never ceased to be modern and current, and it remains the jewel of the art cinema realized during the first, pre-Revolution Iranian New Wave.” Aaron Cutler (November 21, 8:30pm; November 24, 1pm at “To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation”)
