"Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing": The Mortician

The Herald Scotland

15 hours ago

Anyone doubting the vitality and importance of what we might call the cinema of opposition had only to glance at their news feed when the Academy Awards and the Palme d'Or were handed out.
In March, a documentary about life under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank won the Oscar for Best Documentary, while in May veteran Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi won big at Cannes with the regime-baiting It Was Just An Accident.
Over the decades Panahi has regularly been imprisoned and harassed, though he continues undeterred. During one bout of house arrest he shot a documentary and smuggled it to Cannes on a flash drive hidden in a cake. True to form, It Was Just An Accident was shot in Iran in secret and without permissions. His travails put funding rejections from Screen Scotland into perspective.
Happily, this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is platforming similarly challenging works. There's a screening of Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk, Sepideh Farsi's documentary about 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, killed along with 10 relatives in an Israeli airstrike in April. Meanwhile, in the EIFF's competition strand, there's a welcome return for Canada-based Iranian exile Abdolreza Kahani, whose film A Shrine screened at last year's festival where it drew much praise.
Filmed and set mostly in a bleak, snow-bound Montreal but with all dialogue in Persian, The Mortician follows Iranian expat Mojtaba (Nima Sadr) in his job washing the bodies of the deceased in accordance with Islamic tradition. It seems to be a semi-official sinecure, paid for by the Iranian state from an near-empty office run by a stern official with a military bearing. Mojtaba, in contrast, is saggy, baggy and looks eternally perplexed, shuffling from job to job to make the money he sends home to help his eight siblings and their disabled father.
Most clients are dead, obviously, though not all. One wants to be washed alive – he thinks it will cure his insomnia – but finds the process too ticklish. Another, a woman, wants her party-loving daughter to practice so she can wash her grandmother when she dies and by doing so absorb some of the old woman's virtue.
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And then there's Jana (Gola, an Iran-born singer and actress now based in London). An exiled singer of protest songs which are fiercely critical of the Iranian regime, she contacts Mojtaba with a most curious request. It takes him into her secluded rural home and into her life, and sees him partner her in a dangerous project. 'How many more songs are needed for change?' she asks him. 'Something bigger has to happen.'
In a sense, The Mortician is a portrait of a diaspora, but one in which paranoia runs deep. Nobody trusts anybody Jana most of all. 'Delete all your apps,' she tells Mojtaba before his first visit. Elsewhere Kahani turns that feeling into visual motifs: misted-up windows and mirrors, reflections, close-ups of smartphone screens. These all hint at surveillance and scrutiny. As we will learn, the suspicions are not misplaced.
Virtually all the music is diagetic – there is no soundtrack – and Kahani's style is avowedly, almost religiously naturalistic, all of which adds oomph to the film's abrupt, shocking ending. That feeling is rendered even more powerful by what follows: a coup de théâtre the director unveils just when you expect the credits to roll. Uh-uh, he says, instead delivering a sort of written manifesto in which he thanks himself for refusing funding from the Iranian state and explains how he shot the film entirely alone, on a smartphone, in an urgent need to make what he calls 'solo cinema'. 'If I have a phone and a mic, I'm ready,' he states. And how.
Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing, The Mortician is a bold call to arms from a film-maker who is as defiant as he is resourceful.
The Mortician screens as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 17-18