Showing how the oppression of women in Iran has been going on for far longer than some would like to admit, Mania Akbari’s How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish is an insightful film that hammers its point home again and again.
Employing extracts from dozens of films now banned in Iran, alongside documentary footage of the 1979 uprising and excerpts from her own work, this poetic film essay explores the complexity of women’s roles in Iranian society after the Second World War and the apparent ‘freedom’ that they experienced.
How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish feels urgent and has the feel of a filmmaker whose mind was running at 100 miles an hour. There is a confrontational tone that few films will be able to match. Her voice may be calm, but we know she is far from it; she is angry and the male filmmakers of the clips she presents before us are there to take the full brunt of her thoughts.
The interesting choices are what make How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish stand out, though. While she admonishes those male filmmakers who made the films, the women in front of the camera are a mixture of women who remain positive, despite imprisonments and kidnappings. As if they are fine with their treatment when we know that the male filmmakers of these films (some from the silent era) just want to exert their dominance over women and oppress them in any form they can.
Despite this, for some, this film will be an endurance test; again and again, we see violence against women in these clips as she laments about what is happening and why it is happening. It can all be a bit too much. But that is entirely the point; for decades and even longer, if we are honest, this has been happening to women from Iran, and nothing has been done about it. There will be a limit for some audiences, and that is okay; Akbari has made her point.
Akbari adds a blurred border around the clips instead of expanding them to full screen to help accentuate the fact that these clips have been taken from long-banned films and that their current condition may not be the best. You can see the degradation of the footage; these are films that originally were not meant to be seen again, so to have something, anything left of them, is vital. It is an interesting choice that works for the brief 72 minutes we are with it.
However, at the end of How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish, we learn which specific clip was from over 60 films on show. We have clips of Akbari herself and of a dancer interspersed throughout the film. Yet, by only having Akbari’s increasingly festering angry voiceover to guide us, we lose the chance to fully connect with the film. We are, of course, angered and frustrated on Akbari and the women of Iran’s behalf. Still, without a strong structure, it all feels rather caught up in itself.
You want to be all in with Akbari, she is inspiring in her energy within How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish, but that lack of structure limits how well you can do so. Almost as if this is a one-sided conversation that we never got to hear the other side of. While it remains a strong showing of self-expression and highlights the plight of women in her country, you still need more.
★★★ 1/2
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