2023-12-05 21:09:52
In Fremont, the Iranian filmmaker, Babak Jalali, gives an image of Afghan women other than that of victims. Above: Actress Anaita Wali Zada as Donya. JHR Films
CRITICAL – Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali features an Afghan ex-US army translator working in a Californian biscuit factory. Poetry, tenderness and a sense of the absurd are present in this portrait of an uprooted but determined woman.
Inspired Jury Prize, Fremont offered, last September, at the Deauville Festival a precious poetic and absurd interlude. Close to San Francisco, this locality has the largest Afghan population in the United States. This is where Donya settled. A former translator for the American army, the young woman fled Kabul, reconquered by the Taliban in 2021. By day, she works in a Chinese cookie factory, these famous “fortune cookies”: two superimposed wafers which contain a message of ‘encouragement. At night, she tosses and turns in her bed, unable to fall asleep.
When her boss asks her to write the cake maxims, Donya takes the bull of loneliness by the horns and slips her phone number onto one of the papers. Who knows whose hands it will land in? A chain reaction of encounters begins: a taciturn mechanic, a psychologist who is a fan of Croc-Blanc… An elegant and melancholy black and white setting accentuates the existential wavering…
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