سکوت‎‎ ([The Silence], Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998)

Sometimes you just have to realize that a certain director is not compatible for you as viewer. I have to admit that Makhmalbaf is no director for me. I wanted to like him, because he was introduced to me in Close-Up as a director with a social conscience, but I have failed to like his style. Yes, there is poetry in his pictures, but it doesn't hit me.
Here we have a 10-year-old blind Khorsid somewhere in Tadjikistan. His father did not return "from the war". Now the landlord is presing every day to get his rent. Mother urges the boy every day to get the money. Khorsid works as tuner for instruments, but it seems that they are not very popular with customers. Khorsid, however, gets regularly lost on the way to work, as he rather follows pretty voices or pleasing music. At the end they are kicked out of their home. I have read that this film is filled with symbols from sufism. So be it - I didn't catch whatever symbolic value there might have been. Using some chords from Beethoven's 5th symphony is supposed to make the message a universal one.
It is common that people like Makhmalbaf use amateur actors. Sometimes they do a good job; here they don't. They deliver their sentences worse than reading from a book.
I noticed that I saw this already some time ago, but I managed to forget almost all about it. This is not necessarily a valid judgment about this film, but shows once more that this director does not really overlap with me.
2/10

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014, Ana Lily Amirpour)

This is an American movie that was produced in Farsi, yet it was announced everywhere as Iranian vampire western. The setting is intended to remind of an Iranian ghost town, some props might remind of a Western setting.
There is not a lot of plot: a female vampire haunts the city of low lives. We meet a prostitute, a drug addict, a pusher and a boy who is to become the lover of the vampire. I suppose the rest of the town is dead already
Of course it is not in compliance with the role of women in Iranian society that females go out and walk home at night, alone. In this respect the film may be viewed as a feminist answer to a repressive theocracy.
Everybody is lonely in Bad City: the drug-addicted father; the pusher who seeks satisfaction with a hooker and of course a little boy who is there for no apparent reason. There is also a cat, maybe the only free creature in this film. The boy who was trying to look after his father at last flees from Bad City with the vampire. The lights of the car look like eyes of  a cat.
This movie has been highly praised for its stylistic mix  I don't think that movie watching should be like an Easter egg hunt for cliches you  have seen before. Amirpour puts style above substance. Impression above content. Much of the attention is certainly given because she decided to film this production in Farsi; had it been in English it probably wouldn't have managed to attract so much attention.
I don't mind slow films, but this is painfully slow. In the beginning the music starts at normal speed, but then slows down, like a like a record played at the speed of an LP. As a graduation film it could be promising.
2/10

This chador doesn't cover teeth.