Review by Beatrice On 06-Jul-2023
First Scene: Ali attempts suicide, violent and suffocating.
The dilapidated building he is in prevents him from succeeding, and for a few minutes, the breathless man under the water tries to breathe between gasps.
He is blind, sees only shadows but hears noises. A woman wanted by the police has hidden in his apartment.
Leila, under stress, has constant epileptic seizures and, discovered by the man, reveals her anguish of losing her sick son during a chaotic workers' rebellion.
Her only fault was protesting, being charged by the police, and fleeing after an accident while begging to be let go to find her son.
The building is surrounded by the police, but Ali wants to protect her.
A series of characters, investigators, and doctors lead Ali to reticence while continuous flashbacks allow glimpses into the unraveling of a narrative and emotional labyrinth that the screenplay skillfully untangles.
“A concentration camp metaphor that could not be more representative of today's Iran,” said Alberto Barbera, director of Venice 79, about Beyond the Wall.
The director, already known at the Lido festival, returns with a claustrophobic and adrenaline-pumping film, where the discomfort remains constant for all 126 minutes of extreme tension.
An extreme blow to the Iranian condition, through an indisputable directorial and interpretative gem.
Navid Mohammadzadeh's performance, already awarded in the Orizzonti section along with Vahid Jalilvand's direction in 2017, confirms the actor's absolute interpretive talent, deserving the Volpi Cup this year.
The film brings together a woman with no rights and a man who might have some; both fragile, with significant disabilities that intersect by chance through an original directorial development, immediately casting doubt on chronological coherence to build the plot, confuse the narrative, and reveal the solution only at the end.
Jalilvand draws on a famous Iranian poet who speaks of the rebirth of lost hope:
Imagine that the world sleeps and no letter arrives at its destination,
Imagine that some are far away or have never been anywhere,
Imagine that they take bread from the table and words from a book, flowers from the trees and smiles from our lips,
What will they do to our dreams?
06-Jul-2023 by Beatrice