Border Cafe

We don't know much about Iran. TV gives us the images that quickly convey "Iran" in our minds - women covered head to toe in black, people demonstrating, etc.

Movies made by local nationals is one of the best ways to get past those kinds of images. Even if they are making propaganda movies, they unconsciously show us bits and pieces of everyday life that tell us more than a year's worth of tv stories.

So getting to see Border Cafe - it also shows up as Transit Cafe - at the museum tonight was a double treat. We saw a good movie and got a bit of a vaccine against American media Iran stereotyping.

Yes, there were women with just their faces showing, there was family pressure for the widow to move into her brother-in-law's place to protect the family's reputation. But here the brother-in-law explained, cajoled, begged his foreign sister-in-law to move into the new apartment he built for her in his family compound. Meanwhile she reopens her husband's cafe near the Turkish border and creates a community of her own.

OK, eventually the restaurant gets shut down, but partly because it is so successful that it is badly hurting the other restuarants in town. The traditional male hierarchy that reinforces the brother-in-law's power isn't a good thing. Yet it wasn't that long ago that husbands had the legal right to make the decisions in the US, and women here still face a lot of discrimination. Seeing the movie puts a whole different face on life in Iran. It's not THAT different from ours - different in degree, yes, but the movie protrays an Iran that is a lot more decent and humane than are shown usually.

I also never thought about all the foreign truck drivers who carry goods into Iran everyday - Russians, Turks, Greeks, and who knows where else. Watching people who had no common language communicate was also a pleasure.

So how many of you even knew that Iran had a border with Turkey?



Louise Kennedy of the Boston Globe has a thoughtful review.


The winter twilight sky is staggeringly beautiful as it flows from a deep velvet indigo to pastel blue. This evening we had one of those great skies. You can just see a touch of it in the picture above as we were going into the museum for the movie.