In The Hunter, which was shot in the months just prior to the contentious Iranian presidential election in 2009 and then premiered at the Berlinale in 2010, writer-director Rafi Pitts plays Ali, a "taciturn graveyard-shift warehouse security guard, recently released from jail for a never-specified crime," as Melissa Anderson puts it in the Voice. "To avenge the deaths of his beloved wife and six-year-old daughter, killed during off-screen protests, Ali takes out two cops sniper-style and flees to a forest in the north. Pitts, who was born in 1967 in Iran and fled the country in 1981 for England, and cinematographer Mohammad Davudi frequently frame Ali in striking long shots: The protagonist is dwarfed by his surroundings, whether the labyrinthine entrance to his apartment building or the steep dirt incline he descends after killing the police officers. The open spaces stifle just as much as the claustrophobic hearing rooms and stairwells do in this season's other absorbing Iranian drama,...
- 1/5/2012
- MUBI
With The Hunter (2010), director Rafi Pitts continues to spearhead the self-proclaimed ‘Iranian New Wave’ with another masterfully executed poetic-realist work that inhabits the same multifaceted Iran presented in Pitt’s previous feature It’s Winter (2006), albeit with a leaner, harsher approach to character and narrative.
Pitt writes, directs and takes the eponymous role of Ali, an ex-convict whose second chance at peaceful conformity is shattered with the accidental death of his wife in a police shootout with demonstrators. It is undetermined whether the bullet came from police or protester.
With the collected calm of a man with nothing more to lose, Ali takes his rifle, positioning himself on an embankment overlooking the motorway, and fires two precise rounds into the windscreen of a police vehicle - a disconcertingly familiar cultural and political disenchantment that many American film makers have explored in films as wide ranging as Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets...
Pitt writes, directs and takes the eponymous role of Ali, an ex-convict whose second chance at peaceful conformity is shattered with the accidental death of his wife in a police shootout with demonstrators. It is undetermined whether the bullet came from police or protester.
With the collected calm of a man with nothing more to lose, Ali takes his rifle, positioning himself on an embankment overlooking the motorway, and fires two precise rounds into the windscreen of a police vehicle - a disconcertingly familiar cultural and political disenchantment that many American film makers have explored in films as wide ranging as Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets...
- 3/1/2011
- by Daniel Green
- CineVue
A spare, brooding drama from Iran that is perhaps not entirely successful but is certainly intriguing, writes Peter Bradshaw
Rafi Pitts is the Iranian-born director of the powerful 2006 movie It's Winter, and has a reputation for being a poet of emotions and for making films that look beautiful. Both are certainly true of his new film The Hunter, which intriguingly eludes generic pigeonholing. Perhaps not entirely deliberately, Pitts has made a movie with an identity crisis. As it continues, the film appears to change from being a static study of character into a more active drama, and then into an out-and-out suspense thriller. In none of these forms is The Hunter entirely successful, to be honest, but it has flavour and character and poise, and the cinematographer Mohammad Davudi creates some superb images.
Pitts himself plays Ali, a guy with a fierce, if mostly silent sense of pride; he resents his demeaning manual labouring job,...
Rafi Pitts is the Iranian-born director of the powerful 2006 movie It's Winter, and has a reputation for being a poet of emotions and for making films that look beautiful. Both are certainly true of his new film The Hunter, which intriguingly eludes generic pigeonholing. Perhaps not entirely deliberately, Pitts has made a movie with an identity crisis. As it continues, the film appears to change from being a static study of character into a more active drama, and then into an out-and-out suspense thriller. In none of these forms is The Hunter entirely successful, to be honest, but it has flavour and character and poise, and the cinematographer Mohammad Davudi creates some superb images.
Pitts himself plays Ali, a guy with a fierce, if mostly silent sense of pride; he resents his demeaning manual labouring job,...
- 10/28/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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