Recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Marva Nabili’s austere drama “The Sealed Soil,” the earliest extant feature film directed by a woman from Iran, is a marvel. Shot on location in the remote village of Ghalleh Noo-Asgar, the film explores the life of a young woman, Rooy-Bekheir (Flora Shabavis), who, like her country, finds herself amid a fitful transition between the world of traditions and modernity.
Eighteen and unmarried, she is considered an old maid. Early in the film, she rejects yet another suitor. Stuck in a daily routine of chores, she finds freedom only when she is alone in nature. She watches as the younger kids of the village go to school across the way at a new, modern settlement. They get a taste of a country on the brink of change, a world Rooy-Bekheir both longs for and is frightened by. When her parents present her with yet another suitor, a nervous breakdown is misinterpreted as demonic possession, forcing Rooy-Bekheir to face her future once and for all.
Although the film has never played in Iran, upon its release in 1977, it screened at festivals around the world, garnering comparisons to Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Gertrud.” Praising the film’s external and internal examination of this young woman’s life, film scholar B. Ruby Rich wrote that the film shows “how desperate a thing a woman’s self-consciousness can be when neither the old ways nor the new offer her any escape from bondage.”
Born in Iran in 1941, Marva Nabili studied painting at the University of Decorative Arts in Tehran, where she met filmmaker Fereydoun Rahnema. She later starred in his film “Siavash at Persepolis,” which won the Jean Epstein Award at the Locarno Film Festival. Encouraged by Rahnema, Nabili moved to London and later New York City, studying filmmaking at City University of New York and Goddard College.
Her debut feature film “The Sealed Soil” was named Outstanding Film of the Year at the London Film Festival, and Nabili received the Best New Director Award at Mostra Internazionale del Film d’Autore, Sanremo. Her film “Nightsongs,” which chronicles the lives of a Chinese immigrant family living in New York City, was one of the first screenplays developed through Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and was later produced by the PBS series American Playhouse.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Nabili over the phone about bringing a Brechtian view to cinema, capturing the verve of life in remote villages before the Iranian Revolution, and stories that take place in transitional spaces.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
At what point when you were developing the story for this film did you realize you wanted to set it in the village?
My sister lived in the area. She had a house that was about a half-hour drive to this village. So I was looking around for some locations, and I found this village, and I fell in love with it.
What was it about the village that drew you to it?
It was what we call in Persian a castle, but it’s not really a castle. It’s a village surrounded by walls. So the little rooms that you see in the film are all inside this big wall. I had never seen anything like that. So I went there, and I looked at the villages, and I really liked them very much, and I thought that would be a good location.
Did you know right away you wanted to make a film about this generation of girls who are in this transitional space?
Yes, because I, as a young girl, was also refusing anyone who wanted to marry me, because I had just graduated and I was interested in finding out other people who felt like that. When I went to this village, there really was a girl who refused to get married, so I knew this was a good subject. I wrote my screenplay, and then I went there with Flora Shabavis, who was the only actress in the film.
And the rest of the characters are all played by the villagers who actually lived in the village?
Yes, everyone else, whatever they were doing in the film, that’s what they do. They just went about their day.
Obviously, chickens play a really big role in this film, but without spoiling it for readers, I imagine the chickens were also part of the village’s daily life.
Yes, that’s what they had there. It was basically the only meat that they would eat. They worked on a farm, but the farm didn’t have any place for selling meat and all that. So they’ve raised a lot of chickens.
The way you lay out the scenes is almost painterly, yet you have these chickens that add to those layers. I imagine the chickens just sort of did what they wanted, or were you trying to sort of move the chickens into the frame?
No, no, I had no control over those chickens. It was fine with me. It was fun because that was part of the life of the people who lived in the village.
I had read that you studied miniature painting.
Actually, I didn’t. I was fascinated by miniature painting, but I didn’t study it. I went to the university to study painting, but not miniature painting. So I graduated from the university, and then I was always fascinated by miniature painting because it was one of the major arts in Iran for a long time, and it still goes on. I thought this location looked like a little village in a miniature painting.
As you were placing your camera, were you thinking about trying to visually recreate that feeling of looking at a miniature painting?
No, not really. I studied Bertolt Brecht and was very influenced by his method, so I thought I’d have a Brechtian view of this whole place.
Many of these shots are incredibly long. Would you use an entire reel for one shot?
I shot on 16mm, so it wasn’t that hard. This wasn’t like 35mm, where you have to keep changing the reels. The length of the shots was really inspired by the pace of the village. That’s how they lived. I didn’t tell anyone what to do, except for Flora, so they were all doing what they always do.
I love the contrast you create between her in the village walls and her going out to collect wood, her being by the water, and her taking her hair down, surrounded by that beautiful green grass. What were you hoping to evoke with that contrast?
Well, this was where she went to collect wood, and for her, it was like living in the woods, which were very green. She felt very free there. She wasn’t pressured by her parents or the villagers about not getting married, so it wasn’t a corner that she went to every day just to sit there and contemplate. She was very comfortable there.
Do you think that at that time, women had many spaces where they could be comfortable like that?
Well, this was out in the desert. What happened was that the Shah had recently built a village on the other side of this area where her parents live, and the kids, if you notice from the movie, go over to the other side to go to school because that was something new for the town that the Shah had built. Basically, they developed there so these people could move over there, but most of them didn’t want to move.
I thought it was really interesting the way you brought economics into that decision, like how they will have to start buying their groceries from the town store. It was almost as if, by moving to modern conveniences, they were giving up some of their own autonomy.
In most of the villages, everyone sat around and discussed whether they wanted to move over there. They were all thinking about that, but not my character. She wasn’t interested in the new village. But, at the end of the film, when you see her for the first time with the pot on her head, and she stands there because she’s gonna go to the other side for the first time. She somehow had to give up in order to start this new way of living.
I love that a lot of the film is about these transitional spaces. She’s a girl going through transition to womanhood. The town is in transition. The country is in transition. What were you hoping to show about all these transitional states?
Everything around the country was becoming like that. They were trying to modernize. Because of the oil situation, the Shah was trying to improve the country, villages, and everything else, and bring modernity.
Do you feel like your film sort of still has something to say to modern times in Iran?
Well, I made this film in 1976, and I left Iran when we finished. I smuggled the film out because I didn’t know if the people who worked at the airport wanted to see something like that, and introduce an idea like that to the outside world. I smuggled the film out because Iran was changing, but not fast enough.
Have you been able to show the film in Iran yet?
No.
So it’s been over 50 years, and it still hasn’t screened there?
I left Iran and haven’t gone back since the Revolution. So I have not shown it there. I don’t know what their expectations are.
When you watch your film, can you travel back a bit to your country?
Yeah, I mean, I love it. That’s why I went to this village, because I love that kind of setup. And the people were very nice. They’re not nasty or anything like that. I just didn’t want to go there after the Revolution. Things had changed a lot.
When the film was first released, you discussed in interviews how difficult it was for a woman to make films in Iran, but now, obviously, there are a lot of difficulties, I think for a lot of filmmakers in the country.
We used to have a very good film industry there. Very broad-minded and really nice filmmakers were there, because there was freedom. Also, the Shah wanted to modernize cities and wanted Iranian people to be modernized, not like the rulers that are there now. After the Revolution, it totally changed. What the filmmakers did then was very modern, but I don’t know what’s happening now.
What do you hope audiences today will take from your film?
Well, I want them to know about this social problem that women had. In the villages at that time, women had to get married when they were very young, sometimes twelve or thirteen. But there were women who refused. That was my whole purpose: to show that things were changing.
Are there any filmmakers who influenced you or that you think people should seek out?
I got interested in becoming a filmmaker after Fereydoun Rahnema, my professor at university, who had made a documentary about Persepolis, decided to make a feature film called “Siavash at Persepolis.” Siavash is the name of a man who was a prince. Je asked me to play the role of the wife. So we shot that film in the ruins of Persepolis, and I became very fascinated by the process because it was a modern film. It wasn’t an old-fashioned kind of film. He had studied cinema in France. It encouraged me, and he continued to encourage me to leave Iran and study cinema. So I dedicated my film to him.
