by Douglas
Messerli
Atefeh
Khademolreza (screenwriter and director) Meteor / 2023 [10 minutes]
[documentary]
There are very few
movies like this one, a surrealist film about a relationship between two individuals
in the repressive Iran, from which the narrator escapes to Canada, leaving
behind the friend who has apparently been struck down by AIDS.
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Through animation and other images, the film conveys the reality that
such behavior is not only outlawed but that HIV-positive figures are given no
permission to survive, that in fact the punishment is death. The narrator leaves the friend behind to find freedom somewhere else, but the sickened former partner
stays behind, developing a relationship with a man, only to fall further into
illness and die.
This is a very short work, which because
of its digitally-created images does not permit us easy entry to the couple’s
former relationship, but movingly documents a world, nonetheless, of which we
know so very little. The images themselves hint at a world so closed off and
lost that we can have little entry into it.
When
the narrator’s friend dies, his parents claim he has suffered from COVID-19,
failing evidently to reveal his true condition, which is quite apparently AIDS.
Here, at least in a kind of sketch of the situation, we get a glimpse not only
to that problem but through the lens of a culture that is utterly hostile to
even recognizing the problem. Today, of course, one wonders whether it would be
much different in the US. Speaking truth is nearly impossible today in so many
countries.
Los Angeles, April
12, 2025
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema (April 2025).
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