Review of  "Irako" documentary

Irako is the name of a village that is located between three mountains, and each side of it leads to Kohgiluyeh Boyer Ahmad, Chaharmahal Bakhtiari, and Khuzestan. Due to the presence of these mountains, the people of this village experience only 5 hours of sunlight a day.

The short and strange paragraph above has become the basis for making an impressive documentary called Irako. It is strange that the name of this village is known by a few people. So, from the opening minutes we will watch it with curiosity.

The documentary is narrated in the language of a child from the same village and encourages the viewer to empathize. Also, he shares the basic information about the daily life of the village people with the audience with a brief and quick speech. Although today theorists consider it useless to categorize types of documentaries, Irako can be classified as descriptive documentaries. Such documentaries often have a special research, the difficulty of reaching this village probably made the research time long and the director and the research team faced difficulties. Although we don't know how the director came to know this village, but he was successful in getting in touch with the people of the village and recording the way of life of its women, men and children.

This descriptive documentary also has a narrative and visual text. Of course, if the narrative and the child's personal point of view were also documented, we would have seen a more impressive event. In fact, this failure to follow the children's world in the documentary has prevented us from witnessing the director's special point of view behind the narrative, images and situations, and mostly in the second half of the film, we can only watch a situation of the laborious process of building the school. Nevertheless, we are faced with an almost coherent documentary that has pursued and achieved its overall goal, which is to introduce this village to the audience and attract the attention of the government and benefactors to solve the problems there.

Making a documentary is the most difficult type of directing and according to some, the most humane type.

Mahsa Alinaghian