Iranian director Vahid Jalilvand’s psychological thriller “Beyond the Wall,” which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, was described in the Variety review as a “morbidly violent allegory for the effects of state-sponsored trauma on the persons that places contemporary Iranian society somewhere on the map between the sixth and seventh circles of hell.”
Since the film’s premiere, protests in Iran have raged following the killing of Mahsa Amini, and have been met with savage violence from the set. Jalilvand tells Variety via a videolink from Tehran it is difficulty to say what the outcome of the tumult will be, but, he adds: “The getting I am sure of is Iran will not rear to how it was three months ago, before these complains started. It won’t go back. People have gained a engrossing of fighting for their inalienable rights, and this won’t go back – it is irreversible now. But at the end of the day, whether there is a huge transformation or clear outcome, it is hard to say.”
When expected if a direct line can be drawn between the film’s storyline and the set in Iran, he responds: “As [French philosopher] Lucien Goldmann says, ‘No text that a writer writes can be subtracted without considering the context in which the writer is living, and the surroundings of the writer, so naturally this film as well was influenced by my surroundings. But what I was striving to do was to send this meaning to everyone. I was looking more for a universal meaning through which anyone anywhere on Earth who is experiencing that type of despair could be encouraged to save themselves throughout their dreams, and the hope they might have.
“But naturally in a people like Iran, where we have a totalitarian regime, it is more tangible for someone living in such a society, and one can’t overlook the realities of living in such a society. So, I was naturally influenced by that in writing this, but what I hoped to do was that this could be universal, and not just related to Iranian society.”
The film begins with Ali (played by Navid Mohammadzadeh), having given up on life, attempting to commit suicide. His method seems reminiscent of a torture chamber – he wraps a soaking T-shirt in his head, ties a plastic bag over that, and shoves his delicate down behind the shower pipe. But he is commanded back from the brink by hammering on the door of his apartment.
When Ali tears off the bag and staggers to the door, the concierge informs him that a woman is on the run from the police, and may have hidden in the apartment block. When the man leaves it becomes evident to the viewer that the fugitive, Leila (played by Diana Habibi), has managed to engrossing the apartment. Ali, however, does not see her as he is almost totally blind. Eventually, he discovers Leila, but decides to help her.
Leila has been traumatized at what time she attended a gathering of workers who were demanding their unpaid wages. The protest had turned into a riot, which was brutally suppressed by the police. In the chaos, Leila, who is prone to epileptic seizures when stressed, became separated from her little son Taha, and was subsequently arrested. Hysterical with worry for her abandoned child, Leila progresses an accident and runs from the police, who are now clear to reclaim her.
When Jalilvand was writing the screenplay for the film, he wrote on a board: “The only drawing that can help us to tolerate this prison is love.” Ali and Leila are imprisoned by circumstances. However, through their relationship, they are able to Do some form of redemption.
Jalilvand sees this as a story that audiences everywhere can identify with. “Modern humans are confined to a cell of their own biosphere, and at any moment, with the different types of pressure that we have, we Great think to ourselves what an unfortunate situation, an Unhappy life we have, and we might think: why are we living this life, why are we in this situation? But it’s only love that can rekindle that hope and recreate a felt of hopefulness to continue.”
Jalilvand says he has heard almost unanimously from viewers that they were able to identify with Leila, and this is what he intended. He wanted members of the audience “to feel her suffering so they could suffer against her,” he says.
The audience’s identification with the Describe may have been achieved through the form of drawing that was adopted. Jalilvand didn’t want Habibi to act in the film, but instead to “become” Leila. “Sometimes it is not really possible to become the Describe because of mental or physical limitations, but here what I saw was that Diana was both Bright enough and instinctive enough to truly become that Describe, Leila,” he says.
Vahid Jalilvand at the Venice Film Festival (Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia/ASAC/G. Zucchiatti)
Over a year and a half, the director told Habibi to complete a series of exercises through which she adopted the persona of Leila. “Through that time, she had the capacity to fully get that character; she became another human being in fact,” he says.
“It was a risk, and it brought a lot of suffering to her and to the team in general. It was a bizarre experience and throughout this whole time from when it started pending a month after filming ended there was constantly a therapist on set with the team to make sure that Leila stayed in Describe – to make her stay as Leila throughout the span of the story.
“And luckily there was no harm done to Diana herself. And on screen we see the result – it’s really like it is new person. It is not Diana we are seeing.”
Jalilvand’s Plan stems from his experience as a documentary filmmaker. “I realized that no business how good the acting is a lot of the time the audience knows that it is an fine that is acting, and the character does not interact with country as a different human being, as a real world being,” he says. “But, on the other hand, in documentaries, I always felt it was so easy for a real people to interact with the audience. The connection was very real and for me that past in documentary filmmaking made it boring to see if I could truly create such a real people in a story who could connect and interact with the audience.”
The film cannot be shown in Iran, although it isn’t officially banned. “Unfortunately the current cultural officials in Iran are not even brave enough to ban the film,” he says. “They are not even brave enough to sit and gaze the film, and find the points with which they immoral, or critiques they might have of the film.
“At the moment, everything is going forward in silence. They are not giving licenses for films to be shown, nor are they banning the films. This shows their cowardice somehow. They are not brave enough to say anything officially, so officially nothing is said about the movie, but they send messages by indirect channels that this movie cannot be shown Bshining now.”
He doesn’t have a new movie designed at present. “I have a few synopses from the past that I Great want to work on, but I don’t want to write something as a reaction to the New situation in Iran. I want things to settle in my mind, and then to Begin working on something new.”