MEN AT WORK (Kargaran mashghoole karand)

Only an extremely talented director would dare make a film about four middle-class men, two women, and a very tall rock by a mountain roadside. Obsessed with toppling the rock, which seems inexplicably attached to the earth, the men use every possible method to make it tumble down the hillside – their shoulders, shovels, a donkey with ropes, and their vehicles. In this Herculean quest they reveal much about their true natures and relationships with wives and each other. The film shouldn’t work, but it does in an amazing way and in the process reveals a great deal about patriarchy and masculinity in contemporary Iran. Viewers will either vicariously struggle along with them or will rail against the insensitive fools for trying to remove a phallic wonder of nature. -- Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society