Animating Eroded, The Cinema of Ali Hatami الإنجليزية 2014

The agonising, often dead-end route of love, this essential ingredient of Iranian literary tradition has scarcely found a better cinematic expression than in the output of the Iranian New Wave director, Ali Hatami. Local spectators have been enamoured with Hatami’s disarmingly lyrical tales of melancholy, which document a unique attempt in cinematically translating Iranian culture. The resultant formal exploration constitutes part of the uniqueness of Hatami’s cinema, rendering it worthy of discussion at an international scale. In contrast to his compatriot filmmakers with international renown, Hatami’s camera shows a fixation on the past, opulence and artifice. His cinema charts a territory pieced together from the fading fragments of the past; it captures the joy and mourning, love and demise of antiquely romantic people against meticulously textured backdrops. Animating Eroded Landscape is the first ever English-language text entirely dedicated to raising the curtain on the legacy of famously “the most Iranian” filmmaker.