Micro-Wave Cinema Series’ first-rate autumn calendar continues on Sunday, September 27, in 4070 Vilas Hall at 7:00p with an appropriately introspective and atmospheric character study of a Syrian refugee scouring the margins of the New Jersey landscape. Christopher Jason Bell’s The Winds That Scatter examines middle-aged Ahmad (Ahmad Chahrour)’s attempts to assimilate into our country’s unsteady work climate, reaching for the dream of owning his own taxi business. Unable to find his footing after losing his job as a gas station attendant, Ahmad desperately hops from one menial post to the next.
The pensive portrait, which premiered at the Northside Film Festival earlier this year, is stylistically indebted to the world art house cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Nagisa Oshima. Yet the heaviest inspiration to the subject matter of an immigrant’s mounting difficulties is Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), which was largely filmed in Central Wisconsin (including Madison) almost forty years ago. While Herzog’s film favors the mood of a blistering black comedy, Bell’s micro-budget feature is more seriously aligned with Eastern spirituality, bolstered by the director’s conscientious views of the Quran and postcolonial writings of Edward Said, most evident in the spaciously long takes in unique locales that intend to “expose the undercurrent of dissonance in everyday life.”
Psychologically affecting the nomadic course of not only the principal character but the film itself is the Syrian civil war, which has displaced more than eleven million people in the country since March 2011. The Winds That Scatter‘s urgency is magnified in its multicultural collaboration between leading nonprofessional actor-poet Chahrour, researcher Mohammad Dagman, cinematographer Paul Taylor, and director Bell. Beyond Syria’s visibility, Ahmed’s dilemma is also pertinent in America at a time when inflammatory remarks on widespread deportation and a southern border wall from GOP presidential hopefuls have sparked a national discussion (or, more sensibly, decry), thus establishing Bell’s lyrical eighty-minute feature as evermore important to cultural sensitivity and empathy.
For those who may have found lucidity in the meditations of Micro-Wave Cinema Series’ spring send-off, Her Wilderness, Bell’s film will undoubtedly resonate. He will join presenter Brandon Colvin via Skype for a Q&A session with the audience following the public screening.
- The Winds That Scatter plays FREE on Sunday, September 27, in 4070 Vilas Hall at 7:00p. For more information on the Micro-Wave Cinema Series, please visit their Facebook community page. The film’s teaser trailer can be viewed below: