Documentary ‘Rock’ Receives

‘Rock’ a 2015 documentary by film director Hamid Jafari received the award for the best short documentary at the 28th New Orleans Film Festival, October 11-19 in the US. Jafari’s film was awarded the Best Short Film at the Cinéma Vérité Festival in Tehran. It is a 26-minute film set in the south of Iran, telling the story of a woman who goes to the mountain every day with a sledgehammer and a crowbar, Mehr News Agency reported. In Iran’s southern Khuzestan Province near the city of Ramhormuz and in a stark landscape, the woman breaks rocks off a cliff. She lives there, in a hut made of rock. Her day-to-day life is divided between the care she provides to her ailing husband and the long hours spent extracting stones. She seems doomed to live eternally the same daily routine. Day after day, shot after shot, her gestures are the same. Her living environment, around this extremely rudimentary home, is a barren landscape that seems limitless.  The film is mostly shot at a slightly low-angle and highlights the confinement of her situation. She thus appears condemned to the punitive labor whose meaning is only revealed at the end of the film.