User:400cats/sandbox

Feature Films

First sentence: ...western" "with elements of film noir and the restraint of Iranian New Wave cinema" and starring...

Third paragraph: Amirpour's debut film underscores her interstitial identity as an Iranian-American through its landscape and language. Wide shots featuring the monotonous, dipping movement of dark, heavy machinery against an industrial backdrop in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night can bring to mind either "an American suburban neighborhood" or "the oil fields of Iran." The film's language offers layered meanings for both an Iranian and American audience. For instance, an English-speaking audience may call the fictional town of the film "Bad City," whereas an Iranian audience may interpret it as "Wind City," depending on the particular audience's understanding of an English subtitle-based or Farsi-based reading of Arash's license plate.

Styles and Themes

Second paragraph, first sentence: In her A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night Q&A with Roger Corman, Amirpour explains how "all the characters in the story are isolated and grappling with something that keeps them away from other people and themselves and from knowing what they want and from figuring out how to get it."

Third paragraph: Another signature characteristic of Amirpour's film-making is her embrace of the political. Although she approaches any feminist reading of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night with a level of reserve, Amirpour hopes her audience will appreciate the film's representation of a drag-wearing, silent character named Rockabilly who she describes as gay and Bitch Media calls genderqueer. Amirpour says, "If there's one political thing [in the movie], it's not the chador, it's Rockabilly, because it's not OK to be gay in Iran." When confronted with the question of feminism, she explains that her debut film "can be feminist if that's what people think," while still prompting her critics and audience to consider her individuality as an artist separate from her womanhood. Amirpour quips, "I wonder if when Tarantino made Kill Bill, did people say he was being a feminist? It’s weird. I wonder if like, 'Oh a female and so she’s battling misogyny.'”

Fourth paragraph: In Bad Batch, Amirpour ends up claiming a popular political interpretation of her work that moves beyond her original intention. She created the film in 2015 with the vision of depicting society's outcasts and later donned the anti-Trump message ascribed to it. "As for Trump," she tells interviewer Tiffany Pritchard, "I finished the script several years ago so he did not influence this. But if this movie helps in any way to highlight the fucked-up chaotic absurdity of that potential reality, then I am happy to help draw attention to that."