A hidden landmark from 1977, Marva Nabili’s first feature, “The Sealed Soil,” was made in secret in Iran under the Shah. It has never been shown there and although its qualities were immediately recognized in the United States, it has not been released here, until now.
After a digital restoration by the Film and Television Archive of the University of California at Los Angeles and a flurry of recent festival screenings, Nabili’s deceptively modest feature gets a weeklong run at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
An opening quotation from Albert Camus, predicating an individual’s maturity on even failed resistance to the status quo, heralds a leisurely shot of a young woman wrapping her chador. Eighteen-year-old Rooy-Bekheir (Flora Shabaviz) is engaged in a stubborn rebellion. Without explanation, she refuses her suitors. At the same time, she appears to silently oppose the construction of a modern town outside her village.
The film’s understatement mirrors that of its protagonist. Shot on 16-millimeter film, “The Sealed Soil” is largely a series of straightforward middle-shots, many devoted to Rooy-Bekheir’s daily chores. Lamps are lit, grain sifted and chickens fed, mostly within the confines of a dusty communal courtyard. The camera rarely moves. The post-dubbed sound is largely ambient, save for strange music that the solitary Rooy-Bekheir seems to hear when she nears the modern town.
The girl’s subjectivity is celebrated in the film’s most mysterious scene. Resting in the woods and given a rare close-up, she languidly extends her hand to catch the soft rain. As it continues to fall, she undoes her chador and strips off her top. Face hidden, bare back to the camera she allows herself to be ravished by the elements.
The village, however, wants her wed. Her mother, it is pointed out, had four children by age 18. Told that a new suitor is coming, Rooy-Bekheir uses her best dress to attack the chickens in the courtyard and is deemed to be possessed. The movie turns ethnographic, documenting an exorcism. Highly ritualized yet weirdly perfunctory, it evidently works.
Nabili came to New York to study filmmaking in the 1970s, then returned to Iran to write and direct a television series based on classic Persian fairy tales. This project provided cover for “The Sealed Soil” which, smuggled out of Iran, had its New York premiere in 1978, opening a Middle East Film Festival notable for including work by both Muslims and Jews.
“The Sealed Soil” was reported on in The New York Times and singled out for praise in the alternative press. Writing in The Village Voice, the Israeli film critic Dan Yakir compared it to Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” which was both a blessing and a curse.
Nabili, who will be present at several of the BAM screenings, has cited Robert Bresson as an influence, but “The Sealed Soil” is not a would-be European art film. An act of clandestine resistance shot for a pittance at a two-to-one ratio with available light in six days and a cast of villagers (save for Shabaviz, who was married to the cinematographer), it is a triumph of what the Cuban film theorist Julio García Espinosa called “imperfect” cinema.
The film’s pragmatism is intrinsic to its meaning.
The Sealed Soil
Through Thursday at Brooklyn Academy of Music; 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn; bam.org.
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