The stakes are much higher than academia in The Exam (Ezmun), a tense, morally complex drama about high school examinations, the kind that will qualify or disqualify students for higher education opportunities. Writer-director Shawkat Amin Korki’s ironic tale of crime involves two sisters who sink into the bottomless pit of corruption to save the younger one from a forced marriage or, very probably, suicide. Set in an unnamed city in Iraqi Kurdistan where the war against ISIS is reduced to a background threat, it avoids the usual references to the area’s recent tragedies and focuses on the question of woman’s role in emerging Kurdish society. The film bowed in Karlovy Vary and has made its way around festivals, where it stands out for the intelligence and complexity of its screenplay.
Following Korki’s 2015 festival hit Memories on Stone, which dealt with two men making a film about the genocide of the Kurdish people in Iraq in 1988, The Exam reflects a fast-developing region where young women are determined to make the most of the limited choices at their disposal. This theme is a common one in Middle Eastern art cinema (draw a line from Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda from Saudi Arabia to Ayten Amin’s Souad from Egypt ten years later.) But here women’s rights are overlaid with the new problem of civil and government corruption, which threatens the burgeoning meritocracy of a school system.
The central and most resonant character is the ever-anxious Shilan (played by new actress Avan Jamal), unhappily married to Sardar (Hussein Hassan Ali), an uneducated fishmonger who seems puzzled and angered by the uppity women around him. The only response he can muster to his wife and her younger sister Rojin (Vania Salar) is shouting and threats. It’s a surprisingly negative and one-note role for Hassan Ali, who is one of the better-known Kurdish actors (and directors) and who has appeared in Korki’s two previous features.
Shilan, who is portrayed as a woman in a permanent state of desperation, is also the mother of a small girl, a fact that entraps her further in a life she hates. “I just wanted a husband who could understand me,” she says plaintively. Vicariously she seeks freedom through Rojin, a dull-eyed, apathetic girl who has already attempted suicide once, and who doesn’t inspire much confidence that she can read a book right side up. The premise is that she either passes her final exam at the top of her class and goes to college, or she’ll become the bride of another fisherman like Sardar.
Terrified the girl will try to kill herself again, Shilan recklessly sells her jewelry to buy the exam results from a ring of con artists. Funnily enough, they are the most likable characters in the film, particularly their short, pudgy leader “the Engineer” (Hoshyar Nerwayi) whose plan to build a modern English School was torpedoed by local bureaucracy. Now he resourcefully, if criminally, has reinvented himself as a shyster who helps students cheat on their final exams. The scam is to fit a tiny receiver in Rojin’s ear, which will transmit the correct answers that Shilan reads from somewhere in the vicinity. There is a modicum of humor, or better absurdity, in watching the cat and mouse games they play with school authorities who are onto their tricks and start turning off Wi-Fi access during the exams. And what to say of the elderly teacher who only passes on enough correct answers to get the student a passing grade, out of moral scruples?
But it’s a sad comedy that pits a girl’s future against the unethical choice to cheat fellow students out of a deserved education. Here the moral whip is wielded by new teacher Jamal (Shwan Attoof), who comes across as so priggish and self-righteous you’d think he’s a member of the secret police. Korki keeps this interesting tension going as the game becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous for Shilan and her sister, until it almost verges on a thriller in the final scenes.
Placing the characters as silhouettes against a cityscape, Adib Sobhani’s cinematography makes this urban drama a pleasure to look at.
Director: Shawkat Amin Korki
Screenplay: Mohamed Reza Gohari, Shawkat Amin Korki
Cast: Avan Jamal, Vania Salar, Hussein Hassan Ali, Shwan Attoof, Hoshyar Nerwayi, Kawa Kadir
Producer: Mehmet Aktas
Cinematography: Adib Sobhani
Production design: Jalal Saed Panah
Costume design: Katharina Nesterowa
Editing: Ebrahim Saeedi
Music: Mehmud Berazi
Production companies: Mitos Film (Germany) in association with Masti Films (Iraq), WAAR TV.
World sales: ArtHood Entertainment (Berlin)
Venue: Red Sea Film Festival (Arab Spectacular)
89 minutes
