Crimson Gold

Crimson Gold is playing nationwide in the FLC Virtual Cinema through August 20. Watch here.

A searing critique of class conflict unfurls with compressed intensity in this newly remastered 2003 film by Jafar Panahi, from an original script by Abbas Kiarostami (reuniting the pair after their 1995 collaboration, The White Balloon). Crimson Gold focuses on Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin), a wounded veteran of the Iran-Iraq War lately relegated to delivering pizzas around Tehran’s wealthy districts. Despite his sedate disposition, Hussein succumbs to desperation after economic pressures gradually ensnare his life. Panahi’s concern isn’t so much with the violent crime foreshadowed in the film’s harrowing opening sequence as with the rage intrinsic to postwar Iran’s class divisions and the ultimately fatal hold it takes on the country’s marginalized people. An NYFF41 selection. A KimStim release.