Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards is about itinerant teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, who wander a remote, desolate part of Kurdish Iran, in search of students. Like many recent Iranian films, Blackboards is shot in a verite style, with handheld camera and nonprofessional actors, and an emphasis on particular situations rather than a well-rounded plot. I love this style/genre, but its repetition from film to film, and director to director, can become tedious after a while. However, the 23-year-old Makhmalbaf comes up with a very unique and distinctive film, different from anything else I’ve seen…
The landscape is striking: rugged, mountainous, and dry, and altogether unhospitable. Most of the action takes place on trails running along cliffs; rocks are everywhere, while vegetation is sparse. One of the teachers falls in with a group of young boys who are smuggling goods over the border to Iraq; the other, with a group of Kurdish refugees, trying to make it back across the border to their homes. Neither group has much time or energy to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic; these people have much more immediate survival concerns on their minds. They are in constant danger, both from the harshness of the environment, and from the possibility of attacks by hostile troops.
In such conditions, the teachers can’t teach very much; they mostly just wander along with the people they’ve met, trying to survive, and perhaps also to fit in (something they do not do very successfully). One of the fine surprises of the film was the way it resisted the usual noble humanist pieties about teaching and learning.
Blackboards presents a stark and utterly unromanticized vision of the world of displaced refugees, or of what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a “non-juridical zone,” one in which people are deprived of the guarantees of social life, and instead reduced to “bare life.” The film is moving precisely because it is so dry and understated, as befits its depiction of a world in which what is missing is not so much material comforts (though they are scarce) as a sense of belonging which we in the comfortable Western world take more for granted even than we do those material comforts.