Frontier blues

The windswept steppes of Northern Iran are the setting of Frontier Blues, and the homeland of debut feature director Babak Jalali. On the border with Turkmenistan, also inhabited by Kazakhs, the harsh rural scenery is a land of yokels in this bitter-sweet and mildly surrealistic comic docudrama.

A true simpleton talks to the camera, collects car plates, has a pet donkey and constantly nibbles dried apricots. He lives in the home of his uncle, a miserably repressed owner of a tailor's shop with little stock and few customers. Sent out to work, the simpleton and his donkey work on a chicken farm where a young man learns English in order to leave his father and escape to the big lights of Baku.

Meanwhile, like a cinematic jack in the box, an Iranian photographer is composing a volume of his ideas of Turkmen life, accompanied by an unemployed minstrel and a loyal band of four boys. The minstrel's wife was stolen from him, and the farm worker seeks marriage with the seen but not met daughter of a rustic couple in a small farmhouse.

Simple and bizarre, neither picaresque nor poetic, the images of a geographical and social wilderness provide insights into a region's sources of melancholia and madness. Modern conveniences (mobile phones, cassette players and colour television) serve as escape valves while they encourage migration from such sterile environments.

The director's short film, An Afghan in Teheran, is included on the Artificial Eye DVD. Also docudramatic and simple, it depicts a day of kitchen work and housekeeping in the life of an unseen agha's Afghani manservant, also learning English from tapes.