Frontier Blues

Frontier Blues, 2009

Iran | Blu-Ray, Color, 95’ | Persian
Director: Babak Jalali

The film, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, is set in Jalali’s place of birth, Golestan, a province bordering the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan in northern Iran, a region long neglected in Iranian cinema. Frontier Blues, which, according to critics, has a Scandinavian aesthetic and an offbeat humor close to that of Monty Python, consists of four interconnected stories. Portraying, through a minimalist language, the relationships between different cultures and neighbors living in the same geographical area, the film’s narrative is intricate and its characters are united by fate: Alam who dreams of moving to Baku one day and believes that he needs to learn English for this; Hassan, a poor soul who has built himself a life with his pet donkey and newspapers; Kazem, Hassan’s uncle, who owns a clothing store but fails to sell anything; and a Turkmen minstrel and his children, whose sole task is to pose for an anthropological study conducted by a photographer from Tehran. Frontier Blues acts like a film that is the product of a memory made of scattered bits and pieces, of snapshots, of those old photos in which the characters had to pose in front of a camera placed on a tripod.