February 17, 2023
Two expatriate Iranians living in Europe have been nominated for Oscars this year, one having been nominated for an Oscar a quarter century ago. Both men are Tehran-born and moved to Europe as children one to France and the other to Luxembourg.
One is Darius Khondji, with an Iranian father and a French mother, who was nominated in 1997 for his cinematography on the film “Evita,” often rated among the best films of all time. The other is Cyrus Neshvad, whose family fled the revolution and ended up in Luxembourg, where he took up making short films. He was nominated for the Oscar for Short Film Live Action.
Three Farsi films directed by Iranians were submitted by their home countries for the best foreign language film of the year, but none of them were among the final five nominees in that category. They were Iran’s “World War III,” Britain’s “Barnadehha,” and Denmark’s highly acclaimed “Holy Spider,” about an angry Iranian who sought to improve morality in his home town of Mashhad by murdering prostitutes.
Darius Khondji, 67, was nominated for writing the film “Bardo: Fake Chronicle of a Handful of Truth.”
He became interested in film early on and made Super-8 films in his teens. Later in life, he moved to the United States to study at UCLA and then majored in film at New York University and the International Center of Photography. During this period, two teachers influenced his decision to become a cinematographer: Jonas Mekas and Haig Manoogian (Martin Scorsese’s film teacher). He realized, “All I wanted to do was shoot the other students’ films. I was concerned with the power of the image and much less with the story.”
After his time in the United States, Khondji returned to France in 1981 and worked as an assistant for cinematographers and also as a lighting director on music videos and commercials.
His cinematography on “Evita” was nominated for an Oscar for the Best Cinematography in 1997, but he lost to “The English Patient.”
Khondji also worked on three European-shot films by Woody Allen: Midnight in Paris (2011), To Rome with Love (2012) and Magic in the Moonlight (2014).
In 2012, Khondji shot the Palme D’or-winning film Amour, which also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Cyrus Neshvad and his family fled Iran when he was five years old. Since then, he has made his home in Luxembourg. He studied at French film schools in Montpellier and Paris. He has a master’s degree in cinema from the Universite Vincennes a Saint-Denis.
His latest film, “The Red Suitcase,” tells the story of a 16-year-old Iranian girl, who has been sent to Luxembourg to meet a man her family has arranged for her to marry. After arriving at Luxembourg Airport with only a single suitcase, the girl is hesitant to meet the man and begin her new life. Instead, she does all she can to avoid him and escape the airport undetected. At the same time, her father the financial beneficiary of the arrangement is trying to track her by phone.
Neshvad says he could identify with the young woman’s (played by French actress Nawelle Evad) feelings of loneliness when arriving in a new country.
“The Red Suitcase” takes place over the course of just a few hours, but involved seven days of shooting for its 18-minute length.
Short focal lengths helped reinforce the fact that she was alone at night in an unfamiliar place. The edit, he said, was a challenge, as his initial thought was to go with fast-paced cutting, only to ultimately slow it down. “We needed to be very slow,” he explains. “The slower we got, it also gave us opportunity to be more inside her head.”
Dialogue is also minimal. Instead, the girl’s actions and reactions to her circumstances hold the viewer’s attention. The color red represents her heart, and it is reinforced by how tightly she holds the luggage. The bus that she escapes in was specifically selected for its red curtains and the industrial storage area, where she hides, much like a migrant would when trying to escape persecution. Red lighting is also used to show the connection between her heart and the contents of the luggage.
“I hope they [viewers] will take away loneliness and tenderness of this Iranian girl,” says Neshvad of the film.
In the story, Neshvad uses the narrative as a metaphor for things the main character faces culturally and personally; she does not accept how things are, the life her parents gave her, or the traditions that exist in her own country. This short film lets us into the inner terror she faces to be a good Muslim—pleasing her parents and her new husband (whom she’s never met). The film is also Neshvad’s way of speaking out about what’s happening in Iran today, although the film dates back to before the recent protests.
