Endless Borders (2023) ‘IFFR’ Review: Money is not the only currency one can have. Especially in today’s world, knowledge and information are just as valuable since they also have the power to alleviate one’s life. Through films like Bad Press, we witness how withholding information advertently raises its importance. It advocated the necessity of a free press to get access to factual information (whether pleasant or not). On the other hand, films like Radical advocated the importance of education. It showed how knowledge could uplift a person from social and mental shackles and provide hope for a better future.
Abbas Amini’s Endless Borders (Original title: Marzhaye bi payan) is not as openly optimistic as Radical. More often, it presents a scathing look into the gloomy world of people under an oppressive regime. However, just like Radical, it emphasizes how education can prove to be more than just a cursory understanding of the world through the eyes of a dedicated teacher. Education can provide the capacity to engage in a debate than submit to what is being fed as the truth. It can provide one with the capacity to think on your own.
If you are someone like me, who has had easy access to education and did not need to struggle to gain its right, it may feel like a dystopian narrative. Remember how Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 shows the impact of a ban on books? In its dystopian world, the ban came into effect due to the authorities’ fear of people’s access to free knowledge. Although set in a contemporary world from Balochistan, Endless Borders stems from the same fear. What if people could think on their own and make up their minds? This fear has made its regime cut access to people’s right to education.
It creates a setting filled with terror in every moment of their life. This fright envelopes a majority of this film’s duration which unfolds in a small village on the border of Afghanistan and Iran. While one country struggles with the Taliban administration in effect, the other is fighting against its oppressive fundamentalist regime. Both these factors affect the central characters to get stuck in some sort of limitations.
The characters live and breathe in this world of never-ending borders, whether mental or tangible. In fact, they make concerted efforts to put up with a constant sense of dread. Despite being specific to this region, its central message is pertinent since such fear-mongering activities are present in all parts of the world to varying degrees. And amidst them, knowledge becomes a tool to differentiate between truth and falsification, oppression and freedom, or between what is crucial and what isn’t.
While being a pertinent drama about the cost of education in a fear-mongering society, it becomes engrossing due to its keen understanding of its setting and the protagonist you root for. Through Ahmad (played by Pouria Rahimi Sam), we meet an idealistic teacher who educates the local community members. He was exiled from his birthplace due to an offense, where he pursued his passion for teaching. Meanwhile, his partner Niloophar (Mino Sharifi) lives her life in prison, denied even that freedom for the same crime. While the dissonance in their punishment becomes evident, their tragedy coalesces with the film’s central conflict, which brings up many societal themes to the surface.
We meet 16-year-old Haseeba (Behafarid Ghaffarian), who is married to a frail older man at such a young age against her will. One of Ahmad’s pupils, 18-year-old Balaj (Hamed Alipour), makes it his mission to save the poor soul from her unhappy marriage. You see the signs of idealism straining down to this student, who engages in impulsive acts for all the noble intentions.
Beyond their individual narratives, Endless Borders presents the portrait of these two couples that forces us to think about connections between their respective fates. While being put under constantly troubling circumstances, they rethink the purpose of their lives and whether that is dictated by personal motives or their political ambitions (their dedication to the cause they believe in). In their lives as refugees, we encounter a confounding drama that soon turns into a riveting thriller due to the very nature of the struggles they face in their daily lives.
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