Frontier Blues

(Podarok Stalinu)

by Babak Jalali

Iran

Director: Babak Jalali

Script: Babak Jalali

Cinematographer: Shahriar Assadi

Editor: Babak Jalali, Kambiz Saffari

Sound: Maziar Razaghi

Music: Noaz Deshe

Cast: Mahmoud Kalteh, Abolfazl Karimi, K.A. Dordi, Behzad Shahrivari, Karima Adebibe, Hossein Shams

Production: Caspian Films

Contact:
Saadi Soudavar
1 Great Winchester St.
London EC N 2DB
United Kingdom
Tel: +44.7951.693.776
Fax: +44.207.545.6301
Mail: [email protected]

Year: 2009

35 mm, Colour, 96 min, 
OV Farsi and Turkmen with English Subtitles
French Electronic Subtitles

Official Locarno Film Festival selection

French Premiere

Gorgan, an little village on the Iranian border with Turkmenistan. Alam is a 28 year-old Turkmen man who lives with his father and works in a chicken farm. He spends all his free time with his walkman, trying to learn English. Hassan is a 28 year-old Persian man who lives with his uncle Kazem and has a pet donkey. Kazem owns a clothing store but the clothes he tries to sell never seem to fit anyone. A 55 year-old Turkmen minstrel is the subject of a book of photography by a photographer from Tehran. His wife was stolen by a shepherd in a green Mercedes many years ago.

Frontier Blues is the story of longing, waiting, remembering and desperate men and absent women. «Iran’s northern border area with Turkmenistan has long been neglected in Iranian cinema. With Frontier Blues, I want to show this unique and diverse atmosphere. I want to do it through portraying some of the characters that are of that place. A ‘place’ after all is merely made up of the characters that live in it and their behaviour and actions make it what it is.