Along with Jafar Panahi, whose case has received widespread international attention, the lesser known Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to six years jail in December on charges of 'assembly, collusion, and propagandising against the regime".
In June, Rasoulof’s 2005 feature, Iron Island, set on a rusting oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, screened as part a Sydney Film Festival retrospective devoted to his and Panahi’s work and it’s now on the program of the inaugural Iranian Film Festival Australia.
Recently in a panel discussion in Sydney on Iranian cinema, the point was made that it’s a bit of habit – not always an appropriate one – for western film critics to want to reduce Iranian cinema to the political level, thus denying or downplaying its other levels of meaning. Yet while this is not an obviously political film on the literal level, it’s hard to deny the allegorical import of its story about a paternalistic authority that turns vicious when challenged.
Those fortunate enough to have seen Amir Naderi’s great The Runner (1985), the first Iranian film to make an impact in the West, will recognise the Gulf scenario, but where that film featured only an orphan boy living on a ship and took place mainly on dry land, Iron Island depicts an entire community marooned, seemingly willingly, under the firm but shonky command of one Captain Nemat (veteran actor Ali Nasirian).
In this overcrowded environment, Nemat has the men working at dismantling the ship for scrap metal and salvaging the remaining crude oil from the tanks. The women take a low profile and the children take school lessons, or like one small fellow, Baby Fish, sit in the drowned hull catching fish to throw back in the sea.
Something not obvious to non-Iranian viewers, most of these people belong to an ethnic Arab and Shiite minority, the Bandaris (Iran’s majority population is Sunni Persian) – poor Indigenous coastal dwellers with their own distinctive customs, including the wearing of colourful masks by the women.
Rasoulof’s camera explores this miniature society and its rule by this supposedly benevolent dictator. "I don’t charge rent," the captain tells new arrivals, quickly adding that he does however subtract money from their earnings for services incurred on ship. These include medical attention (guess who the ship’s doctor is) or the use of the community’s only mobile phone, looked after by Ahmad, a teenage boy who serves as the captain’s surrogate son.
In a film with relatively little conventional plotting, the boy’s love for a young woman against her family’s wishes provides a narrative throughline. The other story strand concerns the discovery the ship is gradually sinking followed by an eviction instruction from its owners.
At first, Nemat appears set to carry on as if all is normal, repelling visitors when they try to board to service him with the eviction notice. But as the penny drops, he sets about organising his worker bees to salvage what he can from the vessel while he still has a chance. If Iron Island is under-charged on the storytelling level, visually it’s a treat. The floating rust bucket forms one of the most effective ready-made sets a filmmaker could hope to find, and the director and his cinematographer, Reza Jalai, make terrific use if it. There can’t be a hole in the floor, gloomy interior space or diagonally jutting angle bracket unexploited – all framed against the Gulf’s pellucid turquoise. A tremendously evocative sequence in which oil is pumped up from the ship’s bowels and into barrels, then tossed overboard and floated to shore, is an absolute highlight.
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