shahab78

As the title suggests, Tales consists of multiple segments, each telling a story of the life of characters from Rakhshan Bani-etemad's older movies. Segments are non-related, and characters come from different stories, yet they struggle with everyday problems that might appear slightly different from each other, but most of them have common causes at the very core. It sometimes gets uncomfortable, as it should, telling stories of people's pain dealing with drugs, poverty, confinement, etc., but it tries not to make it too unbearable for the audience. The only fact that the writer could bring a handful of feature-length stories, pursue them as short features, put them side by side and make a movie out of them that is smooth, connected and understandable, even for someone unfamiliar with those stories beforehand, is enough to prove the great talent of Bani-etemad as a writer and as a filmmaker. As its said in the movie, no story's ever left unheard, and Tales is a story that's absolutely worth hearing.

This is the story of a woman, coming back from Paris to Rasht, her hometown, after a very long time. Everything reminds her of her childhood, the house, the city, people, ... . She finds out about people she left behind a long time ago, meets the ones that moved on with their lives and also the one that didn't, and still lives in the past. The movie tells stories of different times, and they come together flawlessly. It has a beautiful and steady flow, and some enchanting shots of beautiful north of Iran. Music selection is marvelous and fits perfectly with the pictures. This is a great start for Safi Yazdanian directing career and I hope we see more of him in the coming years.