Arousi-ye Khouban (Marriage of the Blessed) (1989)

• 44% of users liked it
  (265 ratings)

This political allegory managed, by some miracle, to escape the attention of the religious censors of Iran's post-Khomeni regime and was shown in 1989 at the Locarno Film Festival. In the story, a news photographer who has been wounded in the course of covering the Iran-Iraq war is recovering at… More This political allegory managed, by some miracle, to escape the attention of the religious censors of Iran's post-Khomeni regime and was shown in 1989 at the Locarno Film Festival. In the story, a news photographer who has been wounded in the course of covering the Iran-Iraq war is recovering at home. he is haunted by what he has seen in the various wars he has covered. In addition, he is entirely disenchanted with the new post-Pahlavi political regime. He and his daughter proceed to chronicle the desperate state of Tehran's poor, which has remained unchanged for decades. In doing so, he has (as have the filmmakers) put together a damning indictment of the current regime's claims for itself. Of course, once he has taken these photos, no one wants to publish them. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi