MOVING UP

Shahriyar is a garbage man in Kermanshah, Kurdistan. His everyday life: rubbish
and trash. But his mind is elsewhere. His life is literature. There’s a book on a shelf
or dropped on the ground? Shariar loses himself in reading at the risk of forgetting
the world, his family and the demands of his job. His tastes are eclectic: he values
Jack London as much as Shakespeare, Dostoievesky or Samuel Beckett, a
photograph of the latter decorates the wall of his room. But reading isn’t enough;
he also writes, obstinately, filling notebooks, journals, pages and scraps of paper
with love stories populated with beautiful princesses with blue eyes decked out in
brightly-colored costumes. Of this ardent vocation, he wanted to make a profession,
but everything stands in the way of the advancement evoked by the title. A lack of
understanding from his wife and his colleagues, a caustic criticism from aspiring
writers like him in a writing workshop, harassment by his neighbors and repeated
rejections from publishers. The only audience ready to follow his flights of fancy,
an auditory of domestic pigeons on his terrace; enclosed behind bars, they, too,
are unable to reach the heavens. For his first film, Loghman Khaledi delivers the
melancholy portrait of a man wrestling with his dreams. With neither condencension
nor smug naivety, Khaledi makes his character the manifest ambassador of
forbidden hopes, struggling against the dampening conformisim of a society where
everyone is obliged to remain in his place. (NF)