Parvaneh (Nissa Kashani) is a young Afghan woman, working in Switzerland and gaining much-needed money for her family. She wants to wire money to her home country, but her minor status and invalid ID serve as a roadblock for her. She meets an eighteen-year-old teen girl named Emily (Cheryl Graf), who will kindly wire the money for her in addition to offering her momentary companionship until she has to return to her homeland.
Talkhon Hamzavi's Parvaneh is so simple and built on this minimalist relationship that, at twenty-five minutes long, is just asking to be underdeveloped and half-baked. Rather than making the teen girls act like ordinary teen girls, with a lot on their minds and little time to get it all out, Hamzavi casts the short in such a minimalistic light that little gets revealed about the private lives of these girls, and, in turn, there's not a great deal of development or connection that can be formed to these two fairly empty individuals. On a side-note, however, Kashani and Graf strike up a solid chemistry, leading to believe had Parvaneh been extended to a feature-length film that we would've gotten a deeper, more impacting relationship out of them than the stunted one we have here. Even when the short tries to be gritty and a bit seedy, having the two girls go to a club late one night with Parvaneh nearly being publicly molested, it's too little and ends in a predictable manner, with few repercussions and little impact whatsoever.
Starring: Nissa Kashani and Cheryl Graf.
Talkhon Hamzavi's Parvaneh is so simple and built on this minimalist relationship that, at twenty-five minutes long, is just asking to be underdeveloped and half-baked. Rather than making the teen girls act like ordinary teen girls, with a lot on their minds and little time to get it all out, Hamzavi casts the short in such a minimalistic light that little gets revealed about the private lives of these girls, and, in turn, there's not a great deal of development or connection that can be formed to these two fairly empty individuals. On a side-note, however, Kashani and Graf strike up a solid chemistry, leading to believe had Parvaneh been extended to a feature-length film that we would've gotten a deeper, more impacting relationship out of them than the stunted one we have here. Even when the short tries to be gritty and a bit seedy, having the two girls go to a club late one night with Parvaneh nearly being publicly molested, it's too little and ends in a predictable manner, with few repercussions and little impact whatsoever.
Starring: Nissa Kashani and Cheryl Graf.