Set in Iran, based on the true story of two Iranian eleven-year old girls Zahra and Massoumeh Naderi, whose elderly father and blind mother have locked them up in their home. The neighbours have filed a complaint about the treatment of the girls to the authorities, the twin girls are not able to properly speak and had not had a bath for years. Director Samira Makhmalbaf saw the children at the welfare center on the television and was inspired to make the film ‘The Apple’. Makhmalbaf then went to the family members and asked if they could portray themselves in the film. And so here lies the issue between reality and fiction.
Samira Makhmalbaf is the daughter of celebrated Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. She’s played a role in ‘The Cyclist’ (directed by her father) at age eight and went on to become one of the youngest participating director in the world in the official section of the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Although her father played a role in co-scripting and editing the film it’s still a remarkable debut feature at seventeen years of age. The Apple was invited to be shown in more than a hundred film festivals in a period of two years, while screening in more than thirty countries. Clearly, The Apple was a huge success, but for what reason?
Without doubt, The Apple is a fascinating mixture of documentary and fiction methods. Makhmalbaf has taken a real life event that received a widespread media attention and instantaneously reconstructed it when the personnel involved. There is a probability that the director has used a degree of artistic license, but mainly one would like to think that she’s faithful to the real incident and respectful to the family involved, providing them the chance to state their case and do themselves justice. Because this is a staged re-enactment shot for the camera, the boundary between fact and fiction, what is genuine and what is an act is constantly blurred; though Makhmalbaf’s choice in using the real parents and children involved in the incident, one has to assume that the people involved are being completely honest in themselves, rather than make the matter worse by giving a false and ‘better’ impression of themselves.
Makhmalbaf acquired Ghorban Ali Naderi’s cooperation to shoot the film because when the predicament of his daughters’ eleven years long imprisonment became a media scandal, Naderi believed he did not get his opinion across and felt extremely dishonoured when the situation was falsely reported that he had kept the girls chained by hand and foot. Naderi was fixated on this particular inaccuracy and was unable to comprehend the widespread outrage that was directed at him.
“My girls are like flowers. They may wither in the sun. A man’s touch is like the sun.”- Ghorban Ali Naderi
The incident that have caused such scandal in the press, Makhmalbaf is sufficiently shrewd to use the incident to make a number of observations about Iranian society. Suffering from neglect and mistreatment of the two young girls acts as a metaphor of female oppression in a historically patriarchal state. The father Ghorban Ali and his unemployed blind wife uses religion as their comfort, but Ghorban Ali also uses religion as justification for his actions towards their mistreatment of the girls. His quote from above encourages the suppression of women. He refuses his daughters to roam the streets in case anyone (meaning the boys that sometimes climb over their wall to retrieve the ball) touches them which would be a dishonour for the Naderi family if this occurred. Honour is a recurring theme throughout the film. While he, Ghorban Ali is concerned about his daughters becoming dishonoured, it appears as though he’s hiding behind the girls when in truth his main worry is him being dishonoured. Rather than worrying whether or not his treatment of the girls was reasonable, Ghorban Ali focuses more on the press representing him as fair or not. When the news broke out that he has imprisoned his daughters, he is deeply dishonoured. Makhmalbaf takes the press coverage as a reflection of an open and shut case. She provides the father an opportunity to speak and and explain his reasoning over the incident. Makhmalbaf doesn’t portray the father as an object of sympathy, he is quite rather a pitiful figure, the director’s access to the family is crucial in seeking on understanding what actually happened in this incident.
In portraying the twin girls’ discovery of the outside world, a series of situations that Makhmalbaf sets up shows how the children respond i.e. the boy selling ice cream passes by and the girls not knowing what an ice cream is nor that a transaction has to be made. Four days after the story of the girls broke out into the media, Makhmalbaf was able to start shooting and finished the entire film within eleven days. It’s astonishing how she got the family to behave naturally and without self-consciousness.
Apples appear in many religions often as a mystical forbidden fruit. In popular Christian traditions, portrays Adam and Eve taking a bite of an apple from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. As a result, the apple became a symbol for temptation, sin, knowledge immortality and the fall of man. In the film however, the apple itself acts as a symbol of knowledge or the pursuit of it. It is a recurring motif that fascinates the two children. The twins follow a young boy who hangs an apple from his head. The twin girls are fascinated and curious, wanting to know more about the outside world. After playing and experiencing the world outside, the girls return home and mark the wall of their room with images that they’ve seen, such as using handprints to create flowers. They now have a thirst for knowledge that they haven’t had before as their minds were closed off to such new experiences.
The Naderi family are not actors in the film and one should remember that. One could also say that they are victims of certain cultural and socio-economic conditions as well as of their own actions, most especially the parents. To portray this authenticity, Makhmalbaf asks the family to relive their pain again but somehow also manipulating them to elicit the desired effect and performance thus gaining the ‘script’ for the film. In an interview with The Guardian, Samira Makmalbaf asserts that she “did not dictate to anybody what to say, but was fairly sure that, for instance, if (she) showed the father a newspaper article attacking him, he would become upset.” Therefore, it is no wonder Ghorban Ali’s anger in the film towards the social worker is so genuine, wounded from the incident that resulted in insulting the family’s honour. Zahra’s face reflects true fear when she cannot open the lock to the family home in which the social worker has purposefully imprisoned her father to ‘feel what they (his daughters) felt’. Makhmalbaf wanted to evoke the true reaction from the girls and the father, another situation that Makhmalbaf had set up to show how the girls would respond.
In the final scene of the film, we see the same young mischievous boy that previously enticed the twins with an apple as they chase it around the neighbourhood, in the last scene we see him bobbing an apple in front of the twin’s blind mother. The poor woman has no idea what is going on and reacts by calling her daughters. In provoking the mother and perhaps subjecting her to the audience’s laughter, Makhmalbaf’s reaches a new depressing climax by exploiting the blind woman. However, one could say that the last scene was with the intention of implying freedom for the mother, just like her daughters and husband who all escaped the house. Makhmalbaf concludes that when the blind mother reaches for the apple, she has also obtained ‘life’.
The essence of The Apple is that the twins represent the oppression of women in Iran, Makhmalbaf is careful to imply that the angry reaction to their predicament reveals the status of women within a patriarchal Islamic society is improving. The title of the film The Apple takes on a symbolic meaning as well as answering questions that it raises.
Samira Makhmalbaf doesn’t investigate deeper into the baffling logic that encouraged Ghorban Ali Naderi to imprison his children for nearly twelve years, The Apple does a decent job whilst associating it directly to the experience of women in Iran as a whole. However, the only minor hiccup about the film is the combination of documentary and fiction film making. Yes, it allows the family (Ghorban Ali in particularly) to make their case, however, their situation is also for the whole neighbourhood to observe. Samira Makhmalbaf tells the incident in an objective point of view, there is no bias and no obvious sympathy for Ghorban Ali. The Apple more or less is a retelling of facts.