Black Knight **
d’Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi
Franco-Iranian film, 1 h 42
Shot in Tehran even before the protest movement sparked off by the death of Mahsa Amini, this first film by an Iranian living in France is nonetheless extremely acute on his country and the multiple fractures that are undermining it. Urban first, in a sprawling capital where run-down traditional neighborhoods and ultra-modern buildings coexist. Then social, between a penniless middle class that can no longer cope and a privileged elite whose offspring leave to study and make their fortune abroad.
Iman is constantly navigating from one to the other, perched on her motorbike, in the hope of a better future. Living with his father and his younger brother Payar in a district in the north of the city, methodically robbed of his maternal heritage by a promoter uncle, he drowns his unhappiness in cocaine and parties where he rubs shoulders with the golden youth of Tehran. He supplies them with drugs and, from small deals to small deals, sees there the opportunity to finally earn some money. Without knowing it, he puts his finger in a fatal gear whose repercussions will go far beyond his person.
Two brothers with opposite temperaments
Based on a true story that took place in his neighborhood of Tehran and reported by his mother, the young director, trained in France at the Fresnoy art school, weaves a tragedy inspired by Persian mythology with the codes of a genre film. It is about failed revenge, misappropriated inheritance, and complex family ties between father and son. But from this relatively classic narrative framework, he draws a very contemporary film in form. Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi immerses us, with an overexcited and perpetually moving Iman, in the night of the capital, in the midst of a youth without ideals.
In contrast to this frenzy, the young Payar, an amateur boxer, leads a quiet life and placidly accepts his destiny, especially when he takes on the face of his pretty neighbor, Hanna, who has returned from France for the holidays. Like these two brothers with opposite temperaments, the film alternates hectic pace and more languid scenes, until their paths collide head-on.
Made on site, circumventing the constraints imposed by censorship, Black Knight throbs with a beautiful energy, thanks in particular to the intense playing of its main performer (Iman Sayad Borhani). And delivers a striking portrait of a lost generation, also forced to come to terms with the rules of a country that no longer offers it any horizon.