Keswick Film Club - Under the Shadow

You are viewing the old version of our website.

Please visit our current website for all the latest information.

Sunday 26th February 5:00 PM

Under the Shadow 

Director: Babak Anvari Country: UK, Quatar & Jordan
Cert: 15 Year: 2016 Length: 84 mins Language: Persian
Under the Shadow

Programme Notes

Cinema Handout (PDF 83KB)

Audience Reaction

Score: 56.52% Attendance: 49

Reviews

Links

  • More details on this film at the Internet Movie Database

Synopsis

Looking for new things to tempt you with this year, we have a couple of 'chillers' outside our normal scope. This one - written and directed by an Iranian in exile - unfolds from a feminist 'cry of anger' into a much weirder 'things that go bump in the night' horror movie: expect to see much about the problems of life for a lone mother and her daughter in post-revolution Iran... then expect the unexpected...

Shideh has been banned from becoming a doctor as a leftist, her husband is not sympathetic: she is a woman after all. He is sent to the front and she is left to look after her daughter in war-torn Tehran, forced to wear chador in the street and steadily losing all freedoms (she watches Jane Fonda workout videos behind closed blinds).

As life gets harder and harder for them, a bomb falls on their apartment block; but has something else arrived with it? Sleep-deprived Shideh gets more and more exhausted, we are gradually taken from the horrors of the world of war and male domination into an equally scary world of dhinns and poltergeists. "It is impossible to know what is real and what is not, what is a result of Shideh's exhaustion and what is a valid response to living in a war zone" - Sheila O'Malley, Roger Ebert.com.

What makes this film more believable than many straight horror movies is this basis in an already awful reality; it "offers itself up as an allegory of a nation left permanently damaged by the ravages of its own religio-political transformation", as Anton Bitel says on Projected Figures.com.

"As for special effects, did you honestly doubt that peeling duct tape and a sheet of printed fabric, if handled with imaginative brio, could be as frightening as any ten-million-dollar monster?"

Trailer


Comments

comments powered by Disqus

Find A Film

Search over 1375 films in the Keswick Film Club archive.


Film Festival

Festival Logo

27 Feb - 1 Mar 2020


Friends

KFC is friends with Caldbeck Area Film Society and Brampton Film Club and members share benefits across all organisations


Awards

Keswick Film Club won the Best New Film Society at the British Federation Of Film Societies awards in 2000.

Since then, the club has won Film Society Of The Year and awards for Best Programme four times and Best Website twice.

We have also received numerous Distinctions and Commendations in categories including marketing, programming and website.

Talking Pictures Talking Pictures The KFC Newsletter
Links Explore the internet with Keswick Film Club
Find Us On Facebook