Torgheh

Mohammad Hassan Damanzan

Iran, Islamic Republic of

Synopsis

Four Iranian country women encounter life's challenges. Although they face social problems they have a common passion: to release their pain through music.

REVIEW

Set in Iran's harsh mountainous landscapes, this moving dirge of a documentary visually sings of tribal women who play a two-stringed lute-like instrument, the tar. These women measure out their poverty-stricken lives in a little hamlet of mud houses and go about their sheepherding and minimal farming in order to keep their children from starvation. Their husbands have betrayed all but one of these women, whose individual litanies stun this viewer with their similarity: the husband's heroin addiction, the wife's noble decision to serve prison time in his place, her shock when she's released at finding him remarried. Or some variant of this.

One story is a kind of tribal "Big Love," where polygamy is constant torture for the first wife. The new, younger wife is no "sister wife" for her but only a bitter rival with whom she must share every task and practically every moment of her life-including tense evenings while the younger woman sings and plays the tar for their husband. Repeatedly, the tar-playing women of Torgheh, this little hamlet, recount how their husbands ripped happiness from them in an instant and they have no recourse.

But they do play the tar. Banned (by an Islamist state?) to women, the tar nonetheless provides them both a balm and a thorn as they sing surreptitiously of their carefree youth, romance, and long-ago loves. Memories of such joyful times, now gone forever, join with painful bitterness or, at best, mournful resignation in the present.

The women of Torgheh sing unaccompanied, as well, and one old grandmother without her tar warbles the most apocalyptic lullaby you've ever heard. If the terrifying story this lullaby tells can soothe a restless child, one can only wonder what it would take to frighten her.

In spite of all the forces against them, these ill-used women conserve a rebel spirit. Despite the official ban, and despite the police taking their tars from them when they have dared to play at a public event, like a wedding, and even though those same police have burned their tars, the women continue to play-in their homes, in the fields, for each other and the children, for themselves. The film captures the difference between private and public space as it also captures the shepherd's freedom no government can fully regulate.

The tar players resistance is a rebellion of the soul, and it fuels their survival, at least, if not actual social change. We see it in their weathered faces, and in their hands. These women have strong hands, sometimes hennaed at the fingernails, hands that milk the sheep, make the cheese, wash the clothes and dishes and then, with equal fortitude, pick up the tar, tune it, and begin to pluck and strum the rhythms and melodies of their solace and their own slow fire.

-Beverly Allen