Frontier Blues

"Welcome to the land of heartbreaks and tractors," says one of the four protagonists of writer and director Babak Jalali's first feature film, "Frontier Blues." Set in the Golestan Province of the Northern Iranian Frontier the film captures a part of Iran rarely seen onscreen - the region situated amongst the barren steppes and the Caspian Sea and populated by Persians, Turkmen, Kazakhs, and Russians."Frontier Blues" moves with the cool pacing of an Aki Kaurismäki film. It centers on the mundane lives of four characters. The first is Hassan, a young Persian man whose only companion is his pet donkey. He lives with his uncle, Kazem, who runs a forlorn clothing store. Alam is a young Turkmen man who works on a chicken farm and dreams of marrying a girl named Ana. Finally, there is the old minstrel who is being followed by a photographer from Tehran and who helps narrate our tour of this unique area. The stark landscape is animated by Noaz Deshe's hauntingly minimalist score, and the near hopeless repetition of the characters' daily lives is broken up by punctuations of dark humor. ASHLEY SMITH

Cast
Mahmoud Kalteh, Abolfazl Karimi, Khajeh Araz Dordi: Producer
Ginevra Elkann, Saadi Soudavar, Homayoun Assadian: Script
Babak Jalali: Cinematography
Shahriar Assadi: Music
Noaz Deshe: Spoken language
Persian/ Turkmen: Subtitle
English