Game Over: Black Tape: A Tehran Diary, the Videotape Fariborz Kamkari Found in the Garbage (2002) (by Kent Adamson)

Kent Adamson, who also wrote on Half Moon for the Iranian Film Blogathon shows there his strength of analysis as well as compassion when it comes to the Kurdish situation. When I found out his interest in the Kurds, I asked if he had seen the little-known Iranian film Black Tape (with a much longer official title), a movie which also deals with the position of the Kurds in Iran. Kent had not seen it. Now he has. And he has descended into the nightmare wrought on the psyche by this unforgettable movie – a movie that stayed with me for literally days after I first saw it. Please seek it out. It is on Netflix. But don’t say I – and Kent – didn’t warn you.

Black Tape: A Tehran Diary, the Videotape Fariborz Kamkari Found in the Garbage (2002)

Black Tape is a dark unraveling spiral. At its center is a modern Iranian couple circling each other, their marriage a snake eating its own tail. The story breaks down a bond founded on the ashes of war and sex crime. It is a film comparable to nothing. Any easy stylistic or thematic associations merely serve to sidetrack the brilliance of its design. Black Tape presents a harrowing vision of a corrupt controller with a delusional appetite for entrapment, and the rebellion and need for freedom of his prisoner.

It is one of the darkest, most emotionally compelling, and unrelentingly heartbreaking movies I have ever seen.

Watching Black Tape takes you to a naked place in the soul, where the only relief comes with the knowledge that the movie is over. It is not a drama of transformation, absolution or purification. It is a passion play of deep sorrow, reaching emotions which can only exist in the hearts of a feeling audience. Black Tape is a human story, asking for understanding and forgiveness for its own inhumanity.

Black Tape is shot in a loose handheld vérité style designed to look as if the main protagonists used a handycam to capture the unfolding story. As the feature debut film of Fariborz Kamkari, it presents itself as a real life discarded tape that Kamkari fished out of the trash, hence the full title. Establishing creative boundaries that claim an objective point of view, Black Tape quickly hands itself over to the actors.

They are devastatingly believable as they walk a tightrope between casual reality, the careful unveiling of plot and character information, and traumatic melodrama. This movie is fairly obscure, and remains largely unacknowledged, even though it is available on subtitled DVD. Kamkari’s subsequent film, The Forbidden Chapter, a more traditional noir Iranian detective story, is often referred to as his debut film. Black Tape succeeds in the same way that a thoroughbred performer like Fred Astaire could make six weeks worth of rehearsal look like an effortless dance in three minutes of screen time. It is so well done that Black Tape can be mistaken for an improvised movie, shot off-the-cuff.

From the start, something is going wrong in the marriage of Parviz, subtly played by Parviz Moass, and Goli an innocent-looking, but tough-as-nails, Shilan Rhamani. At a small party of friends that the middle-aged Parviz is throwing for Goli’s eighteenth birthday, the couple stays far apart on opposite sides of their luxury apartment. Parviz is with his friends, swapping war stories of the Iran/Iraq war and Kurdish rebellion. Even though the party is for her benefit, Goli is isolated with the women. Parviz tries to pull the group together into a celebration, Goli rebels. She kicks everyone out, shutting him down. As their problems increase, Parviz starts to use the camera to spy on Goli, until she finds out, and begins to plot her defiant escape.

Through fragments of their lives captured on the tape, their suburban masks are stripped away, and we learn the truth of their relationship. Goli was sold to Parviz at the age of nine. He has used her as a sex slave from their earliest days, when he was a Sergeant in the army, at war with her Kurdish rebel father. Parviz thinks he is playing sex games, and that Goli is his willing participant. He ties her to a chair. When she turns the tables on Parviz, tying him up, Goli erupts in a rage that unleashes all that she has been holding back.

The relationship plays out in a series of brilliantly acted and plotted revelations. The leading actors give natural, but intense performances. A confrontation between Goli and her cousin, played by Farzin Sabooni, is breathtaking, as they force each other to step back and face their post-war fate.

Black Tape quietly wraps itself steadily around you, and then rips your heart out with raw human truth. For Goli and Parviz, and all the others scarred by a heartless war, it is game over. Nobody wins.

Not surprisingly, Black Tape is banned in Iran.