SpIFF 2007 goes out in a fitting manner

And on Sunday, it was over. Nineteen film programs and the 2007 Spokane International Film Festival is done. Time to get some sleep.

But first … tonight’s final film was the Iranian effort “From Afar.” Directed by Ramin Mohseni , who up until this film was a television and documentary filmmaker, it tells the story of an Iranian man (Korosh Tahami) during three different periods in his life.

In the first, “Book Burning,” he is a student, studying screenwriting, whose love of books is tested when the demand of simply finding a place to live causes him to look for money that he simply doesn’t have. The second, “Breathing,” features him as a businessman who is more concerned with the wife (Behnaz Jafari) who has left him than he is with making his business actually go.

And in the third, he is an architect who, while being forced to change a project he has been working on, finds himself facing the potential death of his father (Jamshid Hashempour).

The father figure looms in the previous chapters, too. In the first, the father is represented in a book that the student reads about a bookseller living in ancient times who strives to protect his cache of literature in the face of what looks to be Mongol invaders. In the second, he is a painter who specializes in portraying a mysterious landscape that the businessman finds soothing to his emotions.

In the third, he is the loving man who has come to Tehran to see the doctor – only to discover that he is seriously ill.

Much less direct than any of the other Iranian films that I have seen – which include “The White Balloon,” “The Apple,” “Children of Heaven,” “The Circle,” “Crimson Gold,” “Turtles Can Fly,” “The Color of Paradise,” “Under the Skin of the City” and especially the Kurdish film “A Time for Drunken Horses” – “From Afar” is a virtual visual poem.

Yet it does end up representing our protagonist’s progress toward a spiritual goal, represented first by knowledge, then business success, then love, then the lure of nature and finally, the word of God that he learned as a child from his father.

Fitting that the fulfillment of his quest would mark the end of SpIFF 2007, too.