Gabbeh (1996)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

A carpet. Few stories as seeds of humanity. Waves of color. Shadows of existence. A huge carpet. Love as threads of this carpet. A parable, a fairy tale, fragment of a honeycomb with mythical honey. Picture of a world in which past and present are a single stitch carpet.Colors, faces music in a mixture who lives in roots of a way to see and describe the universe.. Traditions and games. Confesions of a spirit and water as Ariadne thread. And images. Seductive, fragile, powerful and harsh. Looks as signs of time who is almost piece of clay. A wonderful Iranian movie about the small eternal truth. Twoo old people. A carpet. And a story. The result - an overwhelming beauty.

I'm giving this movie a 3 because, despite its esthetic strengths, it's a movie that indulges in self-folklorization and self-orientalism, a movie that depicts a journey by an Iranian nomadic tribe, or rather family, in a folklorizing and essentializing manner: the nomadic tribe is portrayed as an essentially primitive, unemotional, animal-like group of colorful heaps of clothes who don't have a human-like notion of time or space or even a decent grip on reality, who act, sound and move like goats, chicken and wolves. The pseudo- spontaneous esthetics on which this movie relies emphasizes this point by sneaking in convoluted similarities between the nomads and those animals.The esthetics of the movie is so intricately designed and so contrived, but deceitfully left to be seen as 'spontaneous' in order to quench what the filmmakers take to be an unquenchable thirst of European viewers for 'exotic beauty and oriental esthetics', which the movie relatively succeeded in doing, seeing the acclaim it received in European countries.The visual symbolism in the movie is so stark that it borders on being unartistic. The depiction of the landscape is beautiful, but this is something you can get if you watch a NatGeo reportage on 'Peoples and Cultures', and not something you would necessarily demand of a cinematic movie. The movie, to me, was emotionless. It did not harbor any kind of emotion towards the subjects of the movie: hatred, love, empathy, nothing, except probably some curiosity towards those 'cinematically bizarre creatures'.The soundtrack in the movie was boring, sometimes inappropriate and sometimes utterly annoying because of the constant bleats of goats and the irksome inexplicable howls of one of the heroes. Besides, the movie is unbearably boring. The contrived esthetics and breathtaking landscape did not prevent me from feeling utterly bored. I had to resist sleep several times during its relatively short runtime of 75 minutes.I don't recommend watching this movie, unless there's no NatGeo reportage on nomadic tribes in Iran, or you're doing graduate studies on self-orientalism in cinema...

The most enchanting movie I have seen in a long time. Visually stunning and breathtaking, like a trip to a museum that is rich with colorful paintings. Many beautifully chanted songs and little dialog. The best Iranian movie I have seen. And on an international level, it's the most artistic, yet not boring. The story comes out in colors, songs, and little dialog (suitable for those who don't like reading sub-titles).This movie marries a fiction story with a documentary about a tribe and their tradition to make Gabbeh, a hand-woven carpet. The screenplay is very original and unusual -- in a good way. It definitely does not follow the clear-cut Hollywood recipe. This might confuse some viewers but this movie would be seen as a gem by other viewers who enjoy creativity.

Gabbeh is a groovy kinda flick, very psychedelic coming from a country known for its radical religosity (i.e. they kill people for listening to rock music etc.)It essentially builds up to a climax where this old dude howls like a wolf while beating a gabbeh. Myself and my remarkably attractive friend Andrew were doubled up in laughter at thi scene, following the bleakness of the subsequent happenings of the movie.Overall, I would recommend this to anyone who is tired of being spoonfed bilge from the Hollywood rubbish machine. It has a good heart, and it's not too long either!