BAPFF: Atomic Heart (2015)

If Iranian cinema has a home, it’s the automobile. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Ten, Jafar Panahi’s Tehran Taxi, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales, Ali Ahmadzade’s Atomic Heart is a road movie without any particular destination in mind, drifting idly through Tehran’s twilight streets, through conversations about atomic mothers and dormant dictators. But where those…

BAPFF: Tales (2014)

When introducing the 2014 Brisbane Asia Pacific Festival, my largely optimistic take briefly pondered “will anyone actually turn up?” before concluding, basically, “who cares.” Fast-forward a year or so later and I have to adjust that answer slightly; as I noted in my Queensland Film Festival piece argued that “sometimes, the atmosphere of the film…