Swathed from head to toe in black, a woman is break­ing stones out of a rock wall using a crow­bar and her bare hands. For sev­er­al min­utes we watch her prying, push­ing, bash­ing, awk­ward­ly wrestling in her flap­ping robes, until the block she is after final­ly comes crash­ing down, right next to the lens of the low camera and her bare feet. (…) In a stone cave dwelling they built them­selves, she tends to her elder­ly hus­band before return­ing the next day to the never-ending work. Her daily rou­tine resem­bles the tor­ment of Sisy­phus – a dusty chore she is doomed to repeat for­ev­er. The stony, red­dish moon­like land­scape of south­ern Iran and the tra­di­tion­al way of life lend an almost bib­li­cal atmos­phere to this serene, aes­thet­i­cal­ly filmed visual poem. (idfa)

Hamid Jafari geb. 1971 in Iran, studierte Film an der Sooreh Uni­ver­si­ty, Teheran, seit den frühen 1990er Jahren entste­hen vor allem doku­men­tarische Arbeit­en. THUS SPOKE THE YEOMAN (2012) wurde beim Apri­cot Tree Ethno Film Fes­ti­val in Arme­nien mit dem Union of Cin­e­matog­ra­phers of Arme­nia Award aus­geze­ich­net. THE ROCK wurde Bester Kurz­doku­men­tarfilm, Cinéma Vérité IFF Teheran.