The Apple Director: Samira Makhmalbaf Year: 1998 Length: 86 min. Country: Iran | France
When I was living in Tehran during the summer of 1997, a friend called one day with the news that Mohsen Mahkmalbaf had just decided to make a film and that the shooting would begin almost immediately. I had spent a lot of time with Makhmalbaf in the previous weeks, sometimes seeing or talking with him by phone almost daily, and had heard nothing about an impending project, so the information came as a surprise.
The new film, I learned, had started just a couple of days before when Makhmalbaf’s
17-year-old
daughter, Samira, saw a news report about twin girls who had been imprisoned by their parents since birth. The idea for the movie was to have the actual family play themselves, and to shoot it quickly, documentary-style. And as it turned out, the feature was to be directed by Samira, with Mohsen serving as writer and editor.
American filmmakers, who often take years to make a feature, surely must envy the cinematic spontaneity
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that some Iranians enjoy. Samira Makhmalbaf, as I recall, saw that news item on a Tuesday or Wednesday. The film started shooting, in 35mm, on Sunday of the same week, and wrapped 11 days later. The resulting feature, The Apple, was finished within weeks, and became a hit on the international festival circuit the following year, hailed as a great debut by a renowned filmmaker’s talented offspring.
A very different kind of father-daughter interaction is at the heart of The Apple. The film opens with a view of the petition that neighbors of the central family sent to the municipal government, causing the two 12-year- old girls to be released from the familial captivity they’d been kept in from birth. Soon it emerges that the situation, though extreme, was not quite as brutal as it first appeared. The parents are poor Turks living in south Tehran. The mother, whose face is always completely shrouded in her chador, speaks no Persian and is blind. She can’t watch the children on her own, the father says, explaining why he found it necessary to lock them up whenever he went out.
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