‘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 Shayda. The co-protagonist girl, that child who must deal with a cornered life, 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 own director: 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 real event flies over the viewer’s mind at the end of the fiction immersed in the Australian film Shayda. The co-protagonist girl, that child who must deal with a cornered life, 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 own director: 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 ShaydaThere is white and there is black. There is abuse, fear and the illusion of seeking the light. However, it is forged through a correctness that cannot be criticized because it goes hand in hand with reason, dignity and frankness, Shaydaco-produced by Hollywood star Cate Blanchett, shows promise from start to finish: in the way the characters are treated, in the structure and in its naturally hopeful ending.

We are faced with a model of a film that is irreproachable in social terms, but which, on the other hand, leaves many more doubts in terms of cinematography. A global mould that leads filmmakers to activism, but not so much to artistic analysis. There is no real character study in this type of work, of which the recent film could also be a part. Deliverya Spanish production directed by Pau Teixidor, released last week, in which another woman, in this case a young woman interned in a centre for pregnant teenagers in Spain in the eighties, establishes relationships with her fellow inmates while dealing with 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, not least the performances. The director’s work with the six-year-old girl Selina Zahednia is magnificent. And, above all, the photogenicity and authenticity of Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, an Iranian actress who has lived in France for years, who we already talked about in these pages a few weeks ago following the premiere 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 points out, 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.