Iconoclastic and opinionated artist Bahman Mohassess opens up about his life and career in FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS
FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS (Mitra Farahani, 2013)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway at 63rd St.
Opens Friday, August 8
212-757-2280
www.lincolnplazacinema.com
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“I really don’t understand what this film you are making about me is all about. If it’s a film about a subject, I must know what role it is I am to play,” Iranian-born, Rome-based artist Bahman Mohassess tells director Mitra Farahani in the captivating, bittersweet documentary Fifi Howls from Happiness. “I don’t know the structure of your work. How does it start? What does it want to say? And where does it end?” he continues. A successful artist in his home country, Mohassess ultimately left Iran for Italy because of regime change and political unrest, which eventually involved government destruction of his work. He was so outraged that he destroyed even more of his own creations and eventually stopped showing his paintings, sculptures, and collages. Iranian artist and documentarian Farahani (Just a Woman, Zohre and Manouchehr) went in search of Mohassess, finding him living as a near-recluse in a hotel in Rome. The iconoclastic artist opens up to Farahani, talking about his parents and the end of his era while expressing his doubt about future generations. He also shares his views on the censorship and destruction of his art, political and social mores, inheritance, legacy, the general devastation going on around the world, and death. “I am only one John the Baptist, preaching alone in the desert,” he says. “It will make no difference. It never will.” In addition, he regularly tells Farahani what she should be doing with her film, directing the director, even though he points out, “I am not directing. I am only giving you my opinion.”
Bahman Mohassess becomes reinvigorated when a pair of collectors want to commission a large-scale painting from him
The narrative takes a delightful turn when Farahani arranges for a pair of Dubai-based brothers and collectors, Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh, to meet Mohassess and commission a large-scale work from him. Mohassess suddenly has renewed vigor, spouting poetry and showing them Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. Farahani compares the events to the plot of Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the two tales having remarkable similarities. Farahani also includes archival footage of Ahmad Faroughi’s 1967 documentary on Mohassess, The Eye That Hears, in which the artist, much younger then, states, “My work deals with one thing only, the condemnation of existence. . . . But at the same time I have compassion.” That just about sums up Mohassess, a beguiling mix of condemnation and compassion, a hugely talented artist who is seemingly devoid of any sentimentality, with a deep-throated, cackling laugh that is unlike any you’ve ever heard.
In Daniel Peddle’s debut feature narrative, Sunset Edge, four disaffected teens go slumming in a supposedly abandoned North Carolina trailer park and run into an unexpected part of its sordid past, with the park itself serving as a character all its own, a constant threat always lurking right below the surface. Just looking for something to do, Jacob (Jacob Kristian Ingle), Blaine (Blaine Edward Pugh), Will (William Dickerson), and Haley (Haley Ann McKnight) hang around the dilapidated park and the surrounding woods, riding their skateboards, shooting paint-ball rifles, and making an enormous, vile mixture of soda and sickeningly sweet candies, trapped between childhood and adulthood. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, local boy Malachi Smith (Gilberto Padilla) is slowly uncovering terrible things about his family history as a mysterious old woman in white (Liliane Gillenwater) appears and disappears in the background. As the two tales begin to intersect, an uncertain immediate future awaits them all. 
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Set amid the junkyards and auto-body shops in the shadow of Shea Stadium, Ramin Bahrani’s follow-up to his indie hit Man Push Cart is a gritty, realistic drama of family and community. Filmed in thirty days in the Iron Triangle neighborhood of Willets Point, Queens, Chop Shop stars Alejandro Polanco as Ale, a street-smart twelve-year-old boy who works for Rob (Rob Sowulski), calling cars into the repair shop, stealing spare parts, and learning virtually every aspect of the trade, legal and not. Ale lives in a small upstairs room in the garage with his sister, sixteen-year-old Isamar (Isamar Gonzalez), who by day works in a food van and at night makes extra cash by getting into cars and trucks with strange men. Neither Ale nor Izzy goes to school; instead, they’re working hard, saving up money to buy a food van and start their own business, but their life is fraught with danger and difficulty nearly every step of the way. Written by Bahrani (
In the summer of 2005, four navy SEALs went deep into the mountains of Afghanistan to assassinate a Taliban leader responsible for the recent death of twenty marines. Writer-director Peter Berg tells the story of Operation Red Wings and the remarkably brave quartet in Lone Survivor, an ultraviolent action thriller that very well could be used as a training and propaganda film for the next generation of super-soldiers. Close-knit navy SEALs Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Michael P. Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch), and Matthew Axelson (Ben Foster) are lying in wait for Ahmad Shah (Yousuf Azami) when they are discovered by a trio of goatherders. Forced to decide between letting the possibly innocent men go or killing them so the mission can continue, they choose the former and start to leave the area, but they soon find themselves in the midst of a bloody firefight, one of the most brutal ever depicted on film. Ultimately, only one of them is left, and Lt. Commander Erik S. Kristensen (Eric Bana) and the rest of the team are ready to go in and try to bring him home alive. Berg, who made the exciting Saudi Arabia-set al-Qaeda thriller