The short documentary “Marzieh and the Bird,” directed by Azar Mehrabi and screened in the competition section of the 43rd Tehran International Short Film and Documentary Festival, offers a delicate, feminine perspective on love, art, nature, motherhood, loneliness, and loss.
An aging woman, living with the memory of her late husband, an artist, and the absence of her two children, who are studying and working in Europe, seeks to find comfort in a new way of life. By creating and arranging a home to her liking in a relatively rural setting in northern Iran, she hopes to overcome her loneliness and losses and rediscover, in a different form, the experience of living with a family. She chooses a life surrounded by flowers and plants, forests, the creatures that inhabit her surroundings, and the sea.
As Marzieh approaches old age, with its inevitable isolation and limitations, she transforms her daily habits and routines to strengthen her resilience. She builds her life around a kind of earthly spirituality, a practical form of mysticism rooted in her relationship with the world around her. Using the materials, resources, and living creatures within her reach, she creates a new and deeply satisfying path for herself.
In this spiritual journey, although her children have grown up, become independent, and moved far away, the maternal instinct that remains deeply embedded in her feelings finds a new expression. She lovingly nurses several newborn mice discovered in a cardboard box in her storage room. She gently strokes a lizard in her garden, delighted at the thought of greeting it with a smile and a cheerful good morning.
When she discovers a black beetle lying helplessly on its back in the garden, struggling desperately to turn itself over, she comforts it and helps it regain its footing, much like a mother helping her young child learn to walk. Separated from her children, when she cannot reach them by telephone, she embraces and caresses the wooden busts she carved of her children years earlier, speaking to them as though they were physically present. She can even hold a snail’s shell to her ear and listen to its silent words, perhaps even its songs, as though listening to her daughter’s voice when her mobile phone is switched off or has no signal.
With the same persistence and affection she might show while teaching her children, or other youngsters, to paint, she patiently gives painting lessons to an elderly, illiterate neighbor who has never held a paintbrush in her life. She encourages the woman to learn and praises her simple, awkward first attempts with the tenderness of a mother celebrating her young child’s earliest achievements.
Marzieh’s daily spiritual practice resembles a form of dedication, a willingness to devote what she possesses to the benefit and care of others. In a sense, she has turned her entire life into an act of giving. She tends her garden, flowers, and plants and cares for the living creatures inside and around her home, whether chickens, roosters, cats, and geese, or mice, lizards, and snails.
Another aspect of Marzieh’s earthly spirituality is her determination to fill, even saturate, the hours of solitude and leisure with art. She is constantly engaged in artistic creation and performance. She paints, makes pottery and sculptures, sings, plays the piano, dances, and expresses herself through rhythmic movement. It is as though she has organized a personal festival of the seven arts around herself, using creativity to overcome loneliness and compensate for all that she has lost. As the lyrics of a famous song suggest, “With these things, I carry on living…”
When the shadow and consequences of the recent war unexpectedly disrupt her routine, the suspension of international travel destroys her hopes of seeing one of her children. For a while, she loses touch with the loving, spiritual way of life she has so carefully cultivated.
She even rebels against the very artistic pursuits that have sustained her. She pounds her fists into the clay she uses for pottery and splashes black paint across her canvases. Yet she endures. Recalling the love she shared with her late husband and drawing inspiration from his life as both an artist and a loving companion, she gradually returns to the spiritual path she has chosen. In a beautiful final expression of renewal, she performs a dreamlike dance in the solitude and silence of the seashore. Then, drawing the image of a bird with outstretched wings in the sand, she symbolically greets her beloved way of life once again.
The documentary “Marzieh and the Bird” reportedly had to be shortened hastily to comply with the festival’s established rules and regulations. As a result, the version presented to audiences may not fully represent everything contained in the original, complete film. Nevertheless, even in this shortened form, “Marzieh and the Bird” is filled with touching, memorable, and deeply endearing scenes and moments.
