Golden Time
GOLDEN TIME
Directed by Atefeh Rahmani | Review by Antonio Rozich
The film Golden Time by the film director, script writer, and producer Atefeh Rahmani superbly showcases the urge many of us have, not just in the film, but in any other forms of art as well. We all want to be great filmmakers, script writers or film musicians, but in full honesty, we don't feel like working much on it, do we? So we try to find shortcuts towards creating that one film, story, or a song that will open the doors to the riches, attention, and overall, a good life. And almost every time the shortcut that made it so much easier for us leads to the same point – failure. Or even a bit more horrible things like in this film. I mean, how can you do that? So here you have a great idea for a film, but that's only half of a well-done cake. You may have top quality ingredients, but you still need to know how to actually make a great cake, or in this case, a film, right? You can have all the best ingredients this world can possibly provide, but if you don't know how to make use of them, it will all go to waste. Luckily, Rahmani has the knowledge. This is best shown with two main characters that are perfectly molded into believable wannabe filmmakers who’ll stop at nothing just to make the film documentary. It’s an interesting thing actually. They present the 90% of people who want to succeed and who are caught in between the love for the art and the inertia of actually learning something.In other words – the passion and the fear. If we give it a quick psychological observation, we’ll notice how at the same time two contradictory aspects are found in this type of persona. The first is the actual passion for let’s say, filmmaking, but the other one is the lack of will to actually learn filmmaking. Sadly, like everything else in life, a “quickly learn filmmaking in 5 easy steps” formula doesn’t exist.
Ok, back to the movie. In this contradictory chaos, the two main characters find an innocent kid to play in their film. The couple wants to create this film as soon as possible so they tell the kid to move here or move there, say this and say that. The more they do that, the more the kid gets confused and it leads to the opposite of what the couple wanted – it leads to failure. On the other hand, the kid innocently stands there as he has no perception of that weird persona the two main characters possess. I mean, how could he? He’s a kid. Now, the next part is probably only me overthinking and over-complicating the point of the film, but bear with me. From the first scene where the kid shows up, I couldn’t stop wondering why a kid? Why not a grownup who could better understand the couple’s intention? Maybe that’s the reason, because it’s easier to fool an innocent kid who doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Time for the overthinking/over-complicating part. The way I see it, the counterpart to that perplexing Passion/Fear character is a mind of a child. If a child finds an interest in something, he won’t find boredom or obstacles in learning it; one of the reasons why it’s easiest for us to learn until we become teenagers actually. You can surely remember something from your childhood you’ve learned by not ever realizing you’ve learned. For example, it was German. I just loved watching cartoons on a German TV channel as a kid and after a couple of years or something; I realized I can actually understand German. Give me a language to learn now when I’m 27 – not a chance, it’s too much work.
The same goes for filmmaking. Here you have two grownups who want to become successful filmmakers so hard, yet they think it’s just too much work so they create shortcuts. On the other side, you have a kid who’s doing what kids usually are doing – he’s being curious. So, the moral of my overthinking which came to me thanks to this great film is this – if you really enjoy filmmaking, if you’re curious about it like a little kid, you’ll learn and succeed. If your goal isn’t filmmaking, but success through filmmaking, I won’t say every time, but you’ll fail most of the time. Finally, I’d like to say how Atefeh Rahmani certainly didn’t take any shortcuts and it resulted in this great film worth of every moment of your attention. Thus, I’m very much looking forward and I’m eager to see what this talented young filmmaker will do next.
While he isn’t writing for Cult Critic, Antonio Rozich is working as a copywriter for a filmmaking startup called Try Cinema. Besides his usual copywriting, he also helps filmmakers with their screenplays by editing them and finding the ways to improve the initial filmmaker’s idea. When all of that is done, he turns to his true & original love: writing flash fiction, which he posts regularly on his site Syeta Stories.
