Iranian director Ida Panahandeh's fourth feature, "The Nikaidos' Fall," took her way beyond her comfort zone. She didn't speak Japanese nor had she ever visited the country, and yet there she was with a Japanese crew and cast, filming a story about the Japanese family dynamic in the ancient city of Tenri in Nara Prefecture. The move to make "The Nikaidos' Fall" seems both inspired and audacious, but the director admits she did not have any prior knowledge about Japan.
"Honestly, I should say not deeply," Panahandeh tells The Japan Times. "The only things I knew very well about Japan were traced back to Japanese films; the masterpieces that were screened by National Iranian Television when I was a child. Later on, when I was a film student, I watched Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Masaki Kobayashi's films again and I was absorbed by their power and uniqueness in telling stories. I could, for the first time, understand what Japanese cinema means."
The filmmaker adds that in Iran, "Japanese film masters are still so famous and cinephiles know them very well."