By Richard Brody

The New Yorker

The Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf is one of the best modern directors, and one of the most precocious of all time, but, even when the repertory houses were in high gear prior to the lockdown, her films were rarely shown. Makhmalbaf made her first feature, “The Apple,” in 1997, at the age of seventeen; her second, “Blackboards,” came out in 2000, and her third, “At Five in the Afternoon,” three years after that. All three display an artistry that is intensely of its time yet at the leading edge, and that is of its place yet reflects an international sensibility—and I’ve recently discovered that all are available to stream. Makhmalbaf expanded, intensified, and refined her artistry from film to film, becoming, by the age of twenty-three, one of the most original directors in the world. (I haven’t seen her fourth film, “Two-Legged Horse,” from 2008, which isn’t streaming anywhere.) She should have joined other rising filmmakers of the time in being considered, now, a modern master. Instead, for reasons unknown to me, she hasn’t made a film in more than a decade (nor left any trace of activity online at all).

Makhmalbaf is the scion of a cinematic dynasty. Her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (who co-wrote the script for “The Apple”), has been a leading Iranian director since the nineteen-eighties; her stepmother, Marziyeh Meshkini, has directed three features, including “The Day I Became a Woman,” from 2000; her younger sister, Hana, has directed two. In effect, the Makhmalbaf family is the Iranian counterpart to the Coppolas—and, remarkably, like Sofia Coppola’s first feature, “The Virgin Suicides,” from 1999, Samira Makhmalbaf’s first feature, “The Apple,” is a story of daughters imprisoned at home. It is also an amazing fusion of documentary and fiction, a dramatization of a real-life event reënacted by the actual people it concerned. (The version that’s currently streaming only has Spanish subtitles.)

The story is centered on a Tehran family, the Naderis, whose elderly patriarch, the father of twelve-year-old twin daughters, is so dogmatically religious that, in order to prevent them from even being glimpsed by males, he refuses to allow them to go out in public at all, ever, from birth onward—not to school, not to play, not to a store. The girls, Zahra and Massoumeh, remain imprisoned at home, locked behind two sets of gates inside the house. They have hardly even learned to speak; their gaits are cramped and awkward. Their mother, who is blind, accepts the patriarchal dictate. But when neighbors realize that there are children in the household, they call the authorities, and the father is forced, under pain of punishment, to let them out. Makhmalbaf lends the story a plainly polyphonic density, blending documentary footage with a true-crime drama, complete with denunciation, investigation, accusation, intervention, and the girls’ experience of liberation. Makhmalbaf films children with a vibrantly unsentimental empathy, capturing their sense of mischievous wonder and surprising autonomy; she also has a keen eye for spontaneous symbolism, such as mirrors and locks and the titular fruit itself, which is prominently featured and suggests dramas of self-consciousness and unnamed temptations and longings.

Makhmalbaf’s second feature, “Blackboards,” is also about oppressed children—it’s a story of violence, deprivation, and terror, set during the Iran-Iraq War, near the border, and centered on Kurdish people who’ve been forced to leave their home town of Halabja after it was subjected to a chemical-weapons attack. The title comes from blackboards that a group of itinerant teachers, in search of work, carry on their backs—and that also serve surprising purposes along the way, including as shields from incoming fire. The teachers can’t get students, which is to say that children in the region are getting no education. One teacher falls in with a group of boys who are “mules,” transporting contraband, at high risk, through the dangerous region; another teacher joins a large group of migrants heading toward the border—and, along the journey, marries a widowed young mother. It’s the teachers who get taught along the way—who find, in the struggle for survival amid the crossfire of two hostile powers, lessons that don’t come from their books. Makhmalbaf herself, in her documentary-rooted cinema, collects and preserves these lessons, and, moreover, lends a highly textured, symbolized identity to them by way of her discerning and composing eye. Her ironic vision doesn’t deride education but affirms it as a basis for recording and transmitting experience—as a model for her own cinema.

Attention to heroic struggles amid horrors—and to the beauty that survivors embrace nonetheless—is heightened and deepened in “At Five in the Afternoon,” one of the great movies of life in wartime; it’s reportedly the first film made in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. In it, Makhmalbaf goes further in her depiction of the urgency of education as a crucial springboard for progress. It’s a tale of two sisters-in-law amid the ruins of Kabul. Noqreh, who’s about twenty, isn’t allowed by her extremely devout father to go to school. With his horse-drawn cart, he brings her instead to a Koranic school, but she sneaks out: she removes her burqa, replaces her slippers with white high-heeled shoes, and heads to a large, outdoor, secular school for girls, where the teacher, a woman, encourages her students to become engineers, teachers, doctors, and even the President of Afghanistan—an idea that Noqreh takes very seriously. Leylomah, her sister-in-law, is married to Noqreh’s brother Akhtar, a truck driver who has vanished; they have an infant, who is starving to death because Leylomah, herself malnourished, can no longer produce milk >>>