A Cube of Sugar
A Cube of Sugar
Director: Reza Mirkarimi
Writer: Mohammad Reza Gohari, Seyed Reza Mir- Karimi
Cast & details:
Stars: Negar Javaherian, Rima Ramin Far, Soheila Razavi, Saeed Pour Samimi, Reza Kianian, Farhad Aslani, Hedayat Hashemi ……….
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 116 minutes
Language: Persian with English, Spanish and French subtitle.
Premiere status: On 24 September 2012, the film was selected as the Iranian entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards.
Reza Mir-Karimi is an Iranian film writer and director. He graduated from Fine Arts University in graphic arts in Tehran. His cinema activities started from 1987 and so far has won so many national international film awards in Iran.
Synopsis, (warning, spoilers):
The film features Pasandideh’s marriage (the youngest daughter of the family) , and chronicles a day of life in a very traditional Iranian family. Pasandideh, lives with her mother, her old uncle, and aunt in an old house in a village in Yazd province. She is soon supposed to marry a family friend’s grandson, who is studying abroad in a western country. Everything is already arranged for Pasandideh’s marriage, and all of her sisters arrive at the old house one by one.
Five generations of the same family are together in the old grandparents’ house for the happy occasion of wedding and each of them show their happiness in a different way.
The older ones making jokes and getting the preparations ready and teenagers helping them and trying to learn the traditions and on the other hand children playing together in the garden and enjoy their time with their cousins.
The overall celebration mood is suddenly changed an hour into the grieving story . While in the act of catching one of his tossed sugar cubes, Uncle Ezzatolah (who is somehow like a father of the family and helped her sister to take care of her children) chokes on the cube and dies.
All the previous narrative threads have now been interrupted, as that one cube of sugar seems to have changed destiny. The whole family gets together to hold the funeral and keep the memory of their uncle alive.
Analysis:
It is a domestic drama set around a marriage ceremony that has been arranged for a young woman from a traditional Iranian family.
This family is a symbol of Iranian society, their people get together in important occasions and situations although they have different opinions. They are not only together in happy moments, but also in bitter moments of life they still stay together.
MIKE O’BRIEN wrote his opinion about this movie on September 13th 2012 as below:
“The whole film is suffused in a warm, golden hue; the hand-held camera expertly weaves and glides, criss-crosses the rooms of the family home in its carefully choreographed observation of the unfolding stories. Then there are the magical interludes where we are invited to step out of time and immerse ourselves in the vivid sensations of the moment. One such scene stands out – where the bride-to-be, on a swing, sweeps gently through the air, repeatedly reaching for an apple: this becomes a moment of exquisite sensuality, like an Impressionist painting brought to life.”