Orion

Did my first day of volunteering at the BFI London Film Festival '10 today. Basically this involved me standing outside the doors handing out 'educational resources' for half an hour, watching the film, then standing outside collecting 'feedback forms' for 10 minutes. Pretty easy work, but I am doing it for free, so c'est comme ci comme ça.

The film was called Orion, directed by Zamani Esmati. It was an Iranian film about an unmarried student who loses her virginity and is arranging to have her hymen sewn back together. The film was shot on location without filming permits for fairly obvious reasons, but it had some very nice shots considering the difficult nature of filming.

I'd never seen an Iranian film before, and it made me realise that a lot of what I know about different cultures comes from watching foreign films. Although clearly what you see of another culture on screen is not necessarily anything like what you see in real life (We don't all live like Skins characters over here- I haven't had a sexy kissing party in weeks), there is obviously a lot about a culture which you can learn from a film. I've seen plenty of British, American, French, East Asian, German, Spanish, etc. cinema, and so despite only having been to very very few of the places I've seen on the screen; I have been able to see concentrated bursts of what creative people in those countries have to say about their lives.

It's a shame that in many countries around the world, the cinematic output is monitored by governments in the way that it is in Iran, and that this means that people don't ever get to see or experience how people live in other cultures, or hear about the issues which exist in every day life for people across the globe.