H ollywood has the Coppola family as its iconic tribe of auteurs, bound together by blood and talent. The Middle East has the Makhmalbaf Family, helmed by Iran's Mohsen Makhmalbaf — the patriarchal founder of that country's first film school. His family are all graduates of the Makhmalbaf Film School: his wife, Marziyeh (screenwriter and director), his two daughters, Samira and Hana (ditto), and his son, Maysam (photographer and producer).
In 1998, Samira made an astounding feature debut with "Apple" at the age of 21, and now her sister, Hana, who at 19 was the youngest filmmaker in the Makhmalbaf clan, has delivered "Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame," a provocatively titled fable depicting the ugliness of a world ripped to shreds by war and terrorism.
Hana worked from a screenplay cowritten by her mother, and as with most other films that bear the Makhmalbaf label, "Buddha" is a familial production (Maysam is the producer and her father the supervising consultant) that has the feel of a hand-crafted school project. There's a brazen straightforwardness in the way Hana tells the story, and many of her images are as blunt and crude as a clay figurine slapped together by a child. This enhances rather than undermines the film's jagged, ungoverned beauty; every frame trembles with savage, repressed energy and radiates outraged emotion. In one scene, for example, a little boy falls into a nasty trap concocted from desert sand and water. When he finally manages to stand up, every inch of him is caked in mud and his desperate face (eyes blinking out from brown grit) resembles a sad, misshapen Buddha.