WINNERS: Director Hassan Naser Shines A Personal And Meta Light On Iranian Cinema

Drawing inspiration from your own childhood is a structural backbone that binds itself to many directors work at some point in their career, for it is often in those formative years that the love for the medium is formed. It can provide a rich landscape for narrative- for those who may relate to a youthful behaviour like the character Ladybird in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 debut or the formation of a lifelong obsession seen in Steven Spielberg’s most personal film yet Meet the Fabelmans.

In Winners director, Hassan Nazer not only mines details from his own upbringing and early life but also weaves in a love letter to Iranian cinema and the filmmakers who helped shape its modern landscape but who were also oppressed for following their vision and passion.

Nazer reveals his intent from the opening credits with a dedication to filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, Majid Majidi, and Jafar Panahi which becomes more aware and apparent as the narrative unfolds.

Stolen screen time and an acquired award

The film opens with a shot of man Naser (Mohammad Amir Naji) framed in a rear view mirror of his van and cuts to the backdrop of a the village of Padeh, a beautiful tracking shot of a place that looks like it may have been used itself as a location to represent a different land in a blockbuster film. We hear cries across the frame, but they are revealed to be coming from a TV screen as a young boy named Yahya (Parsa Maghami) is watching a film (Jafar Panahi’s Taxi) much to the annoyance of his mother (Martine Malalai Zikria). Whilst the boy steals glimpses of the film from under his duvet, his mother criticises Yahya for being consumed by movies and asks ‘Is watching films going to earn you money?’.

The film then cuts to a woman in Tehran in the back of a taxi, she is talking about finally bringing an Oscar statuette back to the country to be exhibited at a film museum in the post-Trump era. A reference to the travel ban that the President had enforced on people from Iran and other Muslim countries which resulted in director Asghar Farhadi boycotting the Oscars ceremony in 2017 after winning The Salesman. But through a slight comedy of errors, the statue is left in the taxi and ends up in the Garmsar post office. As the postal workers arrange for the statue to be returned, one of the elderly workers decides to take it home for the evening back to Padeh where he lives so that his family can have a photo opportunity with the prized possession. On his travels back to his home, the bumpy terrain means the statue is dislodged from the back of his moped and lost along the way.

The predictably sweet plot sees the statue fall into the hands of film-loving Yahya, who does not realise what the statue is, only recognising some value to the shiny golden figure. But less predictable is the subplot that develops through Yahya’s love of cinema.

Passion amongst the plastic

In between acquiring the prized statue, Yayha spends his days between school and scavenging for plastic in a huge dump with the other local kids (something director Nazer himself did, being humiliatingly relegated to plastics instead of other precious metals). Selling his bags of rubbish to the local scrap yard, Yayha also obtains various DVDs from the supervisor Sabir (Hossein Abedini) but, whilst waiting for a copy of Cinema Paradiso (which the films shares a DNA thread with) he steals a copy of Song of Swallows and becomes convinced that the Fagin like owner of the scrap yard is the star of the film.  In one of its meta reveals, it turns out that Yahya is right and that actor Nasser Khan, who won the Berlin Golden Bear for Songs of Swallows is actually running the scrap yard alongside the real Hossein Abedini (who starred in Majid Majidi’s The Father). As the two actors try to conceal their true identity from the local village and the local authorities, a search begins for the lost film statue which closes in on Yahya.

For a such a slender runtime, director Hassan Nazer packs a lot to unpick from Winners, from the personal to the political yet neither overwhelms the film which manages to strike a balance between realism and the fantastical. The character of Yahya, an Afghanistan refugee who has a fervent love of cinema and is played so wonderfully by the charming Parsa Maghami is clearly playing the role of a young Nazer.

The director himself found asylum with a family in Scotland when he fled his home of Iran and had a desire for cinema that he could not fulfill back in his native country due to being ‘red flagged’ for his theatre work. Whilst the regimes of his country have often seen filmmakers persecuted for their work, Winners shines a light on those voices of Iranian cinema, showing a love for their passion and also for the landscape from which it is born. In particular of those directors credited at the beginning of the film, Nazer shines another meta spotlight on director Jafar Panahi, who is associated with the Iranian New Wave cinema. An exceptionally on-the-nose reference to his 2015 film Taxi, which Yahya was watching at the beginning of the film, takes place in the final scenes of the film and hits home at the injustice and impact that Panahi faced at the hands of the Iranian government after voicing his concerns for his fellow Iranian film-makers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad

Nazer shoots the film with an eye that reveals both the barren and the beauty of the land, shots of the vast dump where the children collect rubbish also create a moment of wonder as they run behind a dust cloud, their bags blowing in the wind like kites. In another scene sees Yahya and their close friend Leyla (Helia Mohammadkhani) run across an empty train track, as they lie down, an overhead shot swirls around their figures and they lay on the tracks like dusty snow angels.

Conclusion

Whilst some of Winners references and statements might be not be evident to those unfamiliar with Iranian cinema, it has themes that are universal to those of us that hold such love and passion for the arts, and in particular cinema. It shows how, despite your backgrounds and circumstances, you should never let go of the wonder, joy and escapism that the silver screen can hold and its power to transport us somewhere else, mostly emotionally but also sometimes physically. Nazer may have had to leave his country to make the films he wanted (Winners was supported and financed by Screen Scotland) but he will never leave his country behind and Winners shows how important the medium is and how much success within cinema means to him and his fellow Iranian filmmakers.

Winners is being shown as part of The Hebden Bridge Film Festival whose theme this year is ‘Hope and Resistance’ and runs between 24- 26 March 2023.

Watch Winners