Family affair

But Samira does it her way

"People are afraid of making a film. People try to make me afraid," Samira Makhmalbaf, the 19-year-old filmmaker of the remarkable The Apple told me this past winter at the Rotterdam Film Festival. "If you want, just make a film."

That's what Samira, then 17, did back home in Teheran, borrowing a camera from her famous filmmaker father, Mohsen (Gabbeh) Makhmalbaf, and going out and shooting, documentary fashion, the very odd family she had read about in the newspaper: a blind mother hidden head to toe under a chador; an uneducated father who, insisting that he was following the Koran, kept his twin daughters, 12, lifetime prisoners under lock at home. Finally, the Welfare Department intervened for the unwashed, uncoordinated, barely speaking girls.

Samira filmed, and her father, Mohsen, became consumed by the project. Each day, he offered outlines of "docudrama" scenes, which Samira would try to implement when visiting with the family. She filmed for 11 days. In the evenings, they would watch footage together on her father's Steenbeck, and over several months, Mohsen did the hands-on editing.

Have people insinuated that The Apple is really a film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf?

"They said it at the beginning, particularly in Iran. I expected it. I was happy even, because that meant it's a good film. But after a few times, I got tired of hearing it. Of course, there is his presence: he was editor, screenwriter, and father! That's quite an influence."

But his being the screenwriter, Samira explained, did not mean that her father wrote actual dialogue. "I didn't dictate what people should say. The film is fiction in that it has a line of a story. It's documentary in that the people you see are really themselves: father, mother, children, social worker."

Well, not all of them, Samira admits. The Apple is fiction in that a girl who walks the twins through the city is "my cousin, and she's a wonderful actress." The little boy who dangles an apple on a string hanging from his toe, an apple that the hapless girls try and try to grab, is actually "my father's friend's child, who had been in a film made by my sister. He's a wonderful artist, all the time painting, making sculptures. And as in my movie, he's a naughty, clever boy."

More fiction. The titular apple is placed in the movie by the filmmaker, both to propel the narrative and to function symbolically. "An apple is in the Bible and the Koran also. The little boy with the apple is both Satan and God. At first, he provokes people. But God put an apple into the hand of woman and, to me, it's a symbol of life."

How was The Apple received in Iran?

"Some people didn't like it because they believed it's only about the situation in Teheran. But I was thinking about a universal subject, about men, women, children around the world. It could be a father in California. I read about a girl there, Jennie, who was 13 and couldn't talk. Everywhere, these situations are worse for women than men, and maybe more for women in Iran."

Why did Samira decide to become a filmmaker?

"My parents both worked in the cinema, and I love my parents. My mother was the first audience of my father's work. He'd talk about it to my mother, and I could see the process of making a film. Most of the time I was with my parents on the set. Also I had a kind of private classes at home, with my father and some of his friends talking about art: different schools of painting, making short films. I called my friends to come to these classes, and we were a good audience."

Curiously, Samira's movie education hardly included movies. "I didn't watch a lot of them. Just Iranian films, one or two a year." Citizen Kane? "I just heard about it. I'm so young. I don't have a lot of experience." One movie she really likes? There's a pause. "Nanook, by [Robert] Flaherty. I saw it once in New York. I saw it in someone's house on video."

Samira confessed that she has no plans for university. "I don't think so. I have to have experiences and creativity at the same time. With one term left to get my diploma, I stopped school. I couldn't tolerate it. It was very hard for my family to accept because I was a good student. But I went to school one more year than my father did."

Instead, Samira Makhmalbaf is committed to cinema. "I'm researching what I'm going to do next. This summer, I'll make a short film. Then a feature. And this time, I'd like the experience of editing myself."

On May 6, the MFA hosts an evening with Pennsylvania animators Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. The centerpiece of the event is Paul Fierlinger's Drawn from Memory (1995), a deep, disturbing, profound work, a 58-minute autobiography of the artist that possesses a Maus-like ferocity. It tells, through expert watercolor and pencil-sketch animation, the harrowing story of Fierlinger's childhood as the unwanted son of cold, distant parents who became part of the venal Communist elite in Czechoslovakia after World War II. He despised mom and dad and wished them both dead. He wanted to escape to America. He got both of his wishes. Drawn from Memory is a fantastic movie. Why doesn't everyone know about it?