Generation Magazine

By Melissa Wright

In a crowded Dipson Theatre within Market Arcade on Feb. 18, students, professors and theatre patrons attend “The Apple,” one of the films chosen for the 14th Annual International Women’s Film Festival. This series of films, made possible by UB’s Gender Institute, is not your average, sit back and consume, action-packed blockbusters out of Hollywood. “The Apple,” like several of the other independent films chosen, was produced on low budgets, 35 mm film, and without any professional actors.

Ruth Goldman, an adjunct professor in the Department of Media Studies stood up before the audience to give some opening comments and background. Students of Goldman’s scatter the audience as each of the films in this year’s festival are part of a requirement for her Gender and Film course this semester. “I want you to think about the limitations you have as a Western viewer while watching this film,” she incites.

Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf, the daughter of well-known Iranian film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, “The Apple” tells the true story of Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi, two Iranian girls who are held captive in their home by their father for the first 12 years of their lives.

Makhmalbaf shot the film at age 17, overcoming tremendous cultural taboos. “Filmmaking is not an acceptable career for women in post-revolutionary Iran,” Goldman says in her introductory remarks.

Goldman references Jaycee Duggard, the young American woman rescued last year after being held captive for 18 years. Goldman makes this cross-cultural parallel and then retracts, “but of course the circumstances are different.” “The Apple” comes from another world, one where female oppression is embedded in the very laws of the country. Unlike Duggard, the young girls’ captivity is made public to the surrounding neighbors. Our knee-jerk disgust of their maltreatment is undercut by a culture where women are already limited, are already objects to be possessed, married, ruled.

The Naderi property is almost entirely publicized. Their open yard, enclosed by concrete walls and a metal sliding door is entirely viewable to the second story neighbors, who daily can witness the two smiling, twin captives poking out from behind their barred-room jail cell. The father, an uneducated man, dedicated to his religion, pays for food through charity from the neighbors. His work? Prayer—for money he prays for his neighbors. Chanting and signing, the girls watch him with untrained eyes, hypnotized and delighted. His chants are sad and bellowing; they match his wrinkled, joyless face. He is the sole caretaker for the children; their mother is blind and chooses to isolate herself within their dark home.

But, back to the beginning. The film begins right away with a sense of otherness. The camera is zoomed in on the writing of a letter, the right to left script, already disjointing us from our Western defaults. The letter is a plea from the Naderi neighbors to Social Services. In a rather matter of fact tone, the neighbors describe the young girls’ predicament, citing as most vital their lack of proper hygiene. For this, Social Services take them into custody to bathe them. They are released on the promise that their father will provide them proper care and stop locking them up. (At this, a few people in the audience gasped.)

The opening scenes seem at first to capture the girls’ entrance into the outside world—jagged film cuts from scene to scene, uncomfortable angles, and insistent interviews with the girls, who can respond with little more than stuck out tongues, gibberish, and innocent smiles. The film angles and shots become calmer once the father brings the girls home. Immediately, he locks them up. (And this time, laughter across the audience.) The girls do not resist. One thinks of Stockholm syndrome, but there is something deeper and less clear-cut at hand. There is not a villain and the girls do not act like victims. They re-invent their captivated space through art—soot hand prints stain the walls and they clash their spoons in rhythm against the jail cells. The father is not a villain in the way we expect.

At roughly mid-way through the film, the social worker checks in on the Naderi family to find the girls locked up. She hands the girls a mirror and a comb each, both superficial objects. Immediately, Zahra holds it up to reflect the lock that holds her in. Neither looks at their own faces. It calls to mind the Brazilian short film, “A Vida Politica,” that started the evening off. One of the female activists looks at the camera boldly and says, “Beauty is politics.” In “The Apple,” the social worker, an ambassador for the state, provides culturally deprived girls mere surface level gifts—artifacts of their entrapment outside of the cell.

The social worker demands the key to the gate and unlocks the girls. They leave the premises for the first time on their own.

Outside, their lack of social awareness and etiquette becomes all the more apparent. They steal ice cream from a young boy vendor and allow another young boy to lead them hypnotized by an apple on a string into town. Everywhere in their neighborhood are boys dominating the social space; violating the space of the Naderi yard to fetch a ball, selling ice cream, playing tricks.

And yet the gender inequality does not seem to affect the girls. One young girl they meet out in town even mistakes Massoumeh for a boy and kisses her on the cheek somewhat flirtatiously. Unlike the socialized girls they meet, Zahra and Massoumeh do not fulfill any clear gender roles and as such seem to resist some of the ideology that has ironically held them captive.

Throughout the film, we never see the Naderi mother’s face, as it is completely covered by her traditional scarf. Once she learns the girls and father have left, she wanders out into the street mumbling and swearing, “little bitches.” Just before the movie ends, we catch a glimpse of her covered face in one of the girls’ mirrors. The Western in me wants to see her face and I catch myself while experiencing this impulse. Face, beauty—how shall women grapple with identity and equality with the socializing mirror always flashing in our faces?

Final image: Right after the girls are released and play in the street, they look in a mirror for the first time, but only as the mirrors are held under a running spigot, their images refracting in the light.

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