It was a pleasure to find a movie of my favorite Iranian actress, Leila Hatami (لیلا حاتمی), on Blockbuster Online; and it turned to be a real delight after I watched the movie, Low Height.
Low Height (ارتفاع پست) is a true story of a poor Abadanian family who try to hijack an airliner and fly to Dubai. Abadan is a city in south of Iran, rich in oil but ironically one of the most impoverished regions of the county. The mastermind of the plan, Ghassem, is a desperate oil-drilling worker whose pregnant wife, played by Leila Hatami, reluctantly helps him in this adventure.
The movie is great in Farsi, with good twists and sense of suspense, though in some parts it is spiced up with some exaggerations. However in English, lots of the slangs are lost in translation in extremely minimal subtitles. Also, in the movie there are few referrings that only an Iranian viewer is aware of them, like wearing neckties or removing scarf by some passengers when they realize they are heading toward Dubai instead of another city inside the country.
In one of the beginning scenes, it seems that September 11th happenings are telecasting live on the airport TV. I am not sure that the real date of this hijacking was 9/11/2001, but probably it had to be very close to that date. A surprising thing for me is that exactly on the same day, and about the same time, I was flying from Dubai to Tehran. That day, I saw a double-ducker Airbus and a French acrobatic Mirage in the Dubai international airport, but I was not aware that a hijacked plane is coming there too! And when I got back home in the afternoon, like the rest of the world I was shocked by what I was seeing live on TV.
Comments