‘Shayda’: autobiography of a girl massacred by her father’s fundamentalism, now a film director | Culture

A real fact flies through the viewer’s mind at the end of the fiction immersed in the Australian film ShaydaThe child co-star, the girl who must deal with a life of seclusion, locked up with her mother in a shelter for women harassed by their abusive husbands, unable to go to school or play with friends, basically because she can’t have them, is the director herself: Noora Niasari. Or it was, in the nineties of the last century. A homeless girl, with a brave mother and a jealous father with a tendency towards Islamic fundamentalism; with perpetual dark circles under her eyes and a huge sad face, that today she is a film director and debuts with an autobiographical work.

And yet, despite the knowledge and closeness, the pain and trembling, the obvious injustice and tragedy of the situations, Niasari fails with his film to get out of the lane marked by the irrefutable, almost by the obvious. Shayda It’s true. But Shayda has no conflict. Neither in the central axis, nor in its characters. Maybe because the real life of abused women does not have it. He is the big bad wolf against innocence. But cinema needs it to make the leap from the necessary denunciation of situations to the emotion of complexity. There are no nuances in Shayda. There is white and there is black. There is outrage, fear and excitement in seeking the light. However, crafted through a correction that cannot be criticized either because it goes hand in hand with reason, dignity and frankness, Shaydaco-produced by Hollywood star Cate Blanchett, you can see it coming from start to finish: in the treatment of the characters, in the structure and in its naturally hopeful outcome.

We are faced with a film model that is irreproachable in social terms, which, on the other hand, leaves many more doubts in cinematographic terms. A global mold that leads filmmakers to activism, but not so much to artistic analysis. There is no true character study in this type of work, of which the recent Delivery, a Spanish production directed by Pau Teixidor, released last week, in which another female, in this case a young woman admitted to a center for pregnant teenagers in Spain in the 1980s, establishes relationships with her fellow inmates while dealing with the power and abuse. There are sequences and even interchangeable shots between the members of the model, many of them, like Shayda, filmed in the fashionable format, that once classic 4:3, today almost converted into the formal cliché for stories in which their characters suffer the threat of the ogre, whoever it may be.

Of course, Niasari’s film has other virtues, including its performances. The director’s work with the six-year-old Selina Zahednia is magnificent. And, above all, the photogenic quality and authenticity of Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, an Iranian actress who has been living in France for years, whom we already talked about on these pages a few weeks ago following the release of Tatami (still in Spanish theaters), a film in which he co-stars and co-directs. A woman who also experienced firsthand the closedness of machismo and the degradation of fundamentalism, who had to flee her country after a smear campaign due to an intimate video, and who found light in a first world country, just as than the mother of the director Niasari, whom she has now ended up playing.

Shaydawhich does not want to be psychological or analytical and which does not, although it aims to, reach the thriller levels of the magnificent Shared custody (Xavier Legrand, 2017), has sensitivity, truth and correctness. And the tribute to women and mothers who fight for their rights. But it lacks depth to reach the art of cinema.

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