All Aboard

One of the best films I’ve seen this year is Michael Glawogger’s documentary Workingman’s Death (unfortunately not yet available on DVD). By travelling to Nigeria, the Ukraine, and other distant outposts, Glawogger uses his camera to uncover unseen labor practices in a manner that’s both beautiful and horrible—more than mere social realism, Glawogger’s images (like Sebastião Salgado’s) capture both the magnificence and brutality of human toil.

One of the four segments of Glawogger’s film is set on the shores of the Arabian Sea, where Pakistani laborers risk life and limb to salvage scrap metal from rusting, decommissioned freighters. A single misstep can mean death, yet the environment is profoundly tranquil—blowtorches sizzle and giant pieces of metal calve and crash into the sea, but there’s a quiet beauty to how the waves lap against the beach and the ghostly boats loom in the background.

This work site, at the Pakistani port of Gaddani, is the kind of place you expect a movie to bring you only one time, and then only if you stumble into the right theatre. However, a new film by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is set someplace strikingly similar. Unlike Glasswogger’s documentary, Rasoulof’s Iron Island is a narrative drama—an allegory set some miles away in the Persian Gulf. But its setting is another one of these enormous, derelict ships, whose twisted metal parts and oxidized colors feel like a sci-fi director’s conception of life on another planet.

Rasoulof’s interests are much different than Glasswogger’s. The Iranian filmmaker treats his ship, populated by an assortment of outcasts and refugees, as a microcosm for Iranian society. The vessel is slowly taking on water, and under the direction of a benevolent, though increasingly despotic captain (Ali Nassirian), its occupants cannibalize it to survive. Scavenging for scrap metal and hidden reserves of oil, the atmosphere grows somber as the future clouds and the captain’s authority is threatened by the younger members of the community. Contemporary Iran is at a crossroads, and Rasoulof’s images and storylines are laden with political symbolism (a ship slowly taking on water begs for interpretation).

The director is said to have originally conceived of Iron Island as a stage production, but the exotic setting is what keeps it from becoming more intriguing than a plodding parable. What it shares with Glasswoger’s film are its haunting images—slow motion shots of boys plunging over the side, a youngster trawling for fish in the dim, echoing hull—evoking an existence that most have never imagined.

Iron Island will be released on DVD in August, and is available for pre-order now.

- Nathan Hogan