Films that have new ideas to put on the table are always welcomed. So many filmmakers today feel like the only way they can express their sincere views and emotions is to format these ideas and emotions into a cliché structure. It is good to know, however, that a relatively new filmmaker named Babak Payami can express his thoughts in a story that has never been told before. The film Secret Ballot is a about 'a girl' (Nassim Abdi) who travels through some islands off the coast of Iran with a guide (Cyrus Abidi) meeting random people and marking down their votes for election day. Half the people she meets do not even know who the candidates are; she has to explain their tell them about the candidates for five minutes before they vote. Payami uses the girl's quest for votes as a jumping off point for the greater question of the value of democracy and uses the relationship between the girl and the guide as a jumping off points for questions about feminism in Iran. The commentary on feminism is funny and so are the scenes where the girl is collecting random peoples' votes but to use such a terrible voting system as a way to question the value of democracy is a bit like using the characters from Lord of the Flies as a way of questioning the value of children-the excellent story in this film really doesn't make up for the phony message. I'm unimpressed by Payami's terribly indulgent visual style; if a film is going to have self-indulgent visuals, their should at least be something to indulge in, but I can't say that this is the case for Payami's images. This is the kind of mildly entertaining film that might be not be worth seeing at the movie theatre, but, if you're bored, you could catch on television one day (billions of years from now when they decide to put Iranian films on television.)
Review of Secret Ballot
