Maya

The film that finally made me create an imdb-account and write a review. I couldn´t stand that it still didn´t have one... This is a beautiful and painful film that plays on several levels. It is a grand story told by just letting events unfold, and when I say "grand" I mean it in a small, personal and very human way.

And in all its beauty, it shows a lot of ugliness.

It´s about one man and his relationship to one tiger. It is also an account of a particular zoo in Iran, and in extension the zoo-business in general. And by further extension about the relationship between man and the rest of nature. Asking questions about who we are and what our lives mean. And it´is about the Iranian society, being the backdrop to all the events. But also about all human societies, the human condition so to speak.

But most of all it is about freedom, or the lack of it.

---spoiler----

Seeing Maya having freedom for two weeks of her life, discovering what it means to be a tiger. Seeing her body fill up and her movements and stature change, her eyes change. And then to have it all taken from her. This was painful to watch. Before she was given a taste of real tiger life, all she knew was the cage. How small it must have seemed oncce she was back. Or to put it in a different way: before she tasted freedom, she did not know bondage, she just lived it. Now she will for the rest of her life live it knowingly.

I find myelf asking the question: was it worth having lived for real for two weeks, when the innocense of ignorance can never be reclaimed, and the rest of her life is spent in fully conscious captivity? Is knowing dignity -the might of the tiger- worth the loss of ignorance, when she can not exert it in her life?

This question is -I think- relevant to each one of us, in some way or another we are met with it in our lives. The question of how we can exert our human might (and I mean "might" in the most positive sense) in the confines of different societies.