Writing on the Earth

Writing on the Earth is a very different kind of cinema from what we have grown used to from Iran in recent decades. There does not seem to be any influence from Kiarostami (neither his 35mm nor video productions), nor from Makhmalbaf. At first sight, the film is much more reminiscent of the cinema of the Armenian master Sergei Paradjanov, in which rampant insanity, madness, hysteria, pain and fear creep into the flood of images. The film is about religious insanity. While the world in Writing on the Earth is rural and timeless, no one will miss the significance of this film for today’s society. At first the images are vitalistic and energetic. A man and a woman are delighted by the arrival of a child, but the child is stillborn and the man is inconsolable. He is unable to imagine that there is no divine reason for such a tragic event. While he observes the children in his village, he reaches the conclusion that God wanted to protect his child from earthly vulgarities. And that God has now called on him to help: he has to kill all the children in the village to protect them from the vanity and the evil nature of the world. With his expressionist camera, Ghasemi takes the viewer on a hysterical mission of the fool who is unable to escape his own logic. Laughing with bulging eyes, the man is willing to go to any extreme, even if he has to surrender himself to the fury of the common people who want to protect their children. (GT)