EIFF 2014: My Red Shoes (Mes souliers rouges)

Film Review by Chris Buckle | 26 Jun 2014
Film title: My Red Shoes (Mes souliers rouges)
Director: Sara Rastegar
Starring: Kaveh Rastegar, Fariba Rastegar, Ava Rastegar, Roxana Rastegar

Splicing old home movies with new footage shot at her parents’ house in Nantes, My Red Shoes sees Iranian-born filmmaker Sara Rastegar examine her own family history – and through that, philosophical questions of what constitutes a meaningful life. Via straight-to-camera testimony, Rastegar’s émigré parents share a story of resistance and exile: married amid the upheaval of the 1979 Iranian revolution, harassed and imprisoned for their ideals, and ultimately forced to relocate to France.

The couple’s monologues are intercut with intimate, fly-on-the-wall vignettes – some drawn from the family’s Super 8 archive, others freshly captured. The latter scenes convey a comfortable domesticity, as siblings practice clarinet and violin while their father tends the garden or fabricates items in his workshop (including a rudimentary camera dolly, consciously underscoring the film’s home-grown nature). The only voice perhaps missing is Rastegar’s own: aunties reflect on the past and younger sisters contemplate the future, but Rastegar casts herself as observer rather than participant, with a final shot pointedly taken from the outside looking in. Nonetheless, her close connection with the material inexorably shapes the film’s perspective, teasing universal insights from personal genealogy.

My Red Shoes has its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival

26 Jun, 8.15pm, Cineworld

http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/films/2014/my-red-shoes