The best Mania Akbari’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Mania Akbari’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Mania Akbari.
Ten
7.4/10
A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.
20 Fingers
6.7/10
The subject of the film is male-female relationships. Composed of 7 vignettes, "20 Fingers" features Mania Akbari and Bijan Daneshmand as a contemporary Iranian couple. The film is an intense, bumpy series of conversations and sometimes quarrels reflecting the problems facing Iranian men and women and the struggle between modernism and tradition, liberalism and conservatism.
From Tehran to London
6.3/10
Mania Akbari’s From Tehran to London (2012), has a Russian-doll structure. It begins with Akbari shooting her latest film entitled Women Do Not Have Breasts about a couple, the young poet and writer Ava and her upper-class older husband Ashkan, who live in a large, beautiful – yet isolated – house in the hilly outskirts of the city. Household workers Maryam and Rahim attend to their needs. But despite their comfortable lives, Ava is increasingly dissatisfied and estranged in her relationship with Ashkan. What seems to have been an exciting relationship in the past is now little more than a series of mutual reproaches, as Ashkan incessantly tries to change Ava into someone she isn’t – a dutiful wife.
Dancing Mania
Dancing Mania is a short documentary on the latest film by Mania Akbari titled, From Tehran to London. The film takes a closer look at Akbari’s latest boundary-pushing film that displays females dancing for the first time in Iranian cinema after the revolution. Dancing Mania not only reviews the evolutionary growth of Akbari as an expressive filmmaker in the constrained atmosphere of Iran, but it intelligently employs stills, stop motion imagery, and backstage footage to capture the depth of the themes that are played out in From Tehran to London. Through the lens of critical analysis with a touch of Freudian psychoanalysis, the documentary comments on how the themes of dance, death, sexuality, censorship and devastation come to light through the actor’s dialogues and symbols in the film.
A Moon for My Father
6.7/10
Mania Akbari collaborates with British sculptor Douglas White to coin a tender fusion of langauge, where a meeting of cinema and sculpture investigates the processes of physical and psychological destruction and renewal. Begun a matter of weeks after first meeting, the film charts a deepening artistic and personal relationship exploring the nature of skin, family, death, water, desire and, throughout, a powerful will to form. Akbari looks into the connection between her body and the political history of Iran, investigating the relationship between her own physical traumas and the collective political memory of her birthplace. As she undergoes surgeries on a body decimated by cancer, remembrance and reconstruction provide a framework for investigating how bodies are traumatised, censored and politicized, and yet ultimately remain a site of possibility.
