Introduction

This is a post that is a repurposing of an old-school Mini-Review Round-Up post. As stated here I am essentially done with running multi-film review posts. Each film deserves its own review. Therefore I will repost, and at times add to, old reviews periodically. Enjoy!

The Iran Job

This is a film that very interestingly finds a back door into being a precursor to the Arab Spring movements and a testimonial about how women in the Middle East feel about their current situation. You embark on a film expecting a fish-out-of-water tale about an American basketball player going overseas to earn a living. You get that and the basketball angle, but slowly as he’s there he makes friends. While he wisely tries to stay away from politics as much as he can knowing people starts to bring insights into the state of affairs. There is always a political undercurrent with the election of Barack Obama near the beginning of the film and the controversial Iranian elections coming towards the end.

The Iran Job has a balancing act to pull off and it does so fairly well. It’s a prime example of a documentary going where the footage starts to lead it. Surely, the film may have started out with only aspirations of political undercurrents, ones that may have been shoehorned-in had events not conspired otherwise, alas they did and the film is better for it.

7/10