Cannes Film Festival, Holy Spider, the Web of Religion

The Crimes of The Future film crew ©YesICannes.com

Ali Abassi’s Holy Spider portrays one of Iran’s most notorious serial killers in a critique of the ultra-religious society that endorsed these feminicides in a holy city.

Cannes Film Festival 2022: holy spider ofAli Abassi is one of the most powerful and electrifying films of this 75th Cannes film festival. As much for its “American-style” thriller mechanics as for the talent of the director to make us live agonizing nights in the search for a relentless serial killer, who does not kill for pleasure but for a religious motive. The new opus of David Cronenberg questions us in a dark atmosphere about our responsibility in future events likely to lead to worrying biological mutations.

Crimes of the Future ©Nikos Nikolopoulos

Future Crimes

Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival for CrashDavid Cronenberg continues his exploration of the human body under an agonizing and monstrous aspect with Crimes of the Future. We are at a turning point in human history, and several questions arise: can the human body evolve in a way that solves problems that we have created? While the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the human body is subject to new transformations and mutations.

Holy Spider ©DR

The Nights of Mashhad, holy canvas

Have holy spider by Ali Abassi, an Iranian filmmaker who emigrated to Denmark, it is hard to believe that this film could have been shot in Iran. Indeed, it was filmed in Amman in Jordan, but nevertheless transports us to the narrow universe of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the role of women is decidedly very subordinate. And this pitiful role is not only accepted but advocated, proof of the terrible alienation imposed by a macho society loving its submissive women. No wonder the serial murders of prostitutes go unpunished in the city of Imam Reza’s mausoleum. Until the arrival of a tenacious journalist, Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), a journalist from Tehran, who will crisscross the most disreputable suburbs of this ultra-conservative spiritual center in search of truth.

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Banned from an ultra-religious society

After the very original Grans (Border), which brought him the Un Certain Regard Prize in 2018, Ali Abbasi takes us to the heart of the investigation into a series of feminicides which concerns prostitutes strangled in the holy city of Mashhad. Considered “impure”, these women stealing the husbands of honest women, are ostracized from an ultra-religious society, to the point that even their parents deny them. The scenario is inspired by real events: In 2001, Saeed Hanaei murdered sixteen prostitutes claiming to purify the city of its sins in the name of Islam. His trial caused a stir and he was considered a hero for the more conservative part of society. “I had no intention of directing a serial killer film. On the other hand, I wanted to make a film about a society that has become a serial killer. says Ali Abbasi.

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perform a religious duty

Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani) was a very religious man, a Mason, a good husband and a good father, a citizen above suspicion. After harrowing scenes of murders and the search for the killer in this thriller, Ali Abassi also shows that part of public opinion and the most conservative media praised Hanaei, transforming him into a hero whose public demanded the liberation, convinced that he had only fulfilled his religious duty, a “duty” consisting in cleaning the streets of “impure” women. This captivating thriller on the condition of women in Iran is more topical than ever in an Iran where, despite the militant and feminist actions of two Iranian lawyers Shirin EbadiNobel Peace Prize in 2003 and Nasrin SotoudehSakharov Prize for freedom of thought in 2012, women still live in the shadows and prohibitions.