CINEMAtech closes the Autumn 2016 season with an award-winning film from the Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf.

"A vision of humanity." --New York Times

"A sensational movie." --The Guardian

The Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf's film "Blackboards," from 2000, is set in the Kurdish region along the Iran-Iraq border, among what may well be the world's largest stateless nationality. Kurds are a significant minority in Turkey and Syria, as well as Iran and Iraq, and they have faced bitter repression and rejection of their national identity in all of those places. Makhmalbaf's film (which, amazingly, she made at the age of nineteen--and it was her second feature!), depicting wanderers, refugees, and permanent exiles, is set against the desolation of the Iran-Iraq war, and it culminates in a trip to Halabja, the Kurdish village that Saddam Hussein's armed forces subjected to a chemical-weapons attack in 1988.

The movie derives its title from the accoutrements of the itinerant teachers who look for students in the region--and their blackboards, in the midst of a war zone (and Makhmalbaf shows that, though the war was officially over, the violence against Kurds was ongoing), come in for some surprising, poignant uses. Language and storytelling, self-revelation and self-concealment, truth and lies, authority and freedom--love, friendship, and trust--all are woven into the story as essential questions of education. As the United States entangles itself in debates over teacher evaluation, high-stakes testing, class size, and charter schools, it's worth considering, by way of "Blackboards," that the issues at stake are no mere margin-trimming; they reach to the heart of political culture and personal character. --Richard Brody, The New Yorker