Mohamed Rasulov’s film “But No Evil”

VoltMore stories. The first one starts from the parking lot. Two people carried the heavy object onto the cart; it was later proved that it was a bag of rice. The recipient of the rice ration was a short, bearded man who drove home from the Tehran prison where he worked. He picked up his wife, a teacher, from work, and his daughter from school. They go shopping, take care of their grandmother, and eat at the pizzeria. Middle-class life. But at three in the morning, the alarm clock rang. The bearded man got up and drove to his place of work. There, he waited until the five green lights on the control panel turned on, and then he pressed a button. In a room next door, five corpses fell into the void. The legs in the pants twitched, the blisters were empty with pain, and then the body stood still.

In the second story, six soldiers lay on bunks in a room. One does not rest. He couldn’t kill, Puya kept shouting, but because it was one o’clock in the morning, his comrades couldn’t understand him. “We are not with Mutti,” one said, and another said: “This is the law.” A third offered him this job-worth 50 million Toman. The fourth man threatened Puya with condemnation, and the fifth man handed him a piece of paper. Then execution begins. Puya and a guard escorted the prisoner to the executioner’s room. On the way, Puya fell ill. In the toilet, he read the closed note. Outside, he grabbed the gun from the guard, tied him to the prisoner, then overpowered the guard and fled outside. A car was waiting for him in the backyard. Pouya’s girlfriend was driving. They drove overnight. Milva sang the old partisan song “Bella ciao” on the radio. Puya threw the gun into the quarry. The lights of the city flickered below.

The director has been in the crosshairs of censorship for years

The prejudice against political films has a long history. It is said that it is not a movie, his photos are just evidence, his character is a doll, and his story is a corset. This movie proved otherwise. In four attempts, he circled a question that touched the core of humanity, and when it was over after two and a half hours, it was still in the room. But we have seen four ways to answer it, and all four lives are irreversibly shaped by this answer. Each of these lives represents many other lives, but none are just placeholders. The person who presses the button is a flesh and blood person, just like the soldier Puya and the other two people mentioned by Muhammad Rasulov in “But No Evil”-they don’t discuss, they act, and pass what They did so, and the problem of the movie became a problem of fate for them.

The question is whether a person can kill on order: not in war or in self-defense, but as a tool of the judiciary, as an executioner. The fact that the films it produces are from Iran is not surprising, because there are many reasons for the films there-including the friendly image of Shia, the high level of the Iranian Film Academy, and the country’s special situation as a battlefield between the two countries. . Islamic tradition and metropolitan modernity-one of the most exciting things in the world. Even more surprising is that this movie actually exists. Because its director has been in the crosshairs of censorship for many years.