Desert Dancer (Richard Raymond, 2014): UK

Reviewed by Raven Arce. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Desert Dancer (Richard Raymond, 2014) was the opening film for this years Santa Barbara Film Festival and it was surely a beautiful one. Set to follow the true story about a boy who hid his dance in Iran for fear of getting caught by the morality police. This film helps the watcher to better understand some of the hard circumstances going on in Iran, not only because we see they can’t dance, but they can barely do anything without fear of getting beaten, lashed, or killed.

We start out with a comparison of this film with Dirty Dancing (Emlie Ardolino,1987) as a young Afshin (Reese Ritchie) pulls the film out of a box. While we surely can connect the basis of this film to Dirty Dancing to Desert Dancer there are many things that differ, such as the fact that you wouldn’t be killed for dancing in the former movie mentioned. After being punished for dancing in class Afshin makes his way to a school dedicated to the arts, only cementing his love for dance.

Afshin and a few others begin a secret dance group just as the voting and demonstrating for 2009 presidential election starts to come to a head. This film makes the point to put your dreams a head of things that may hold you back, even yourself and the fear that binds you. When Afshin holds up that green bandana at the end of his performance in France, you can truly see the freedom he finally feels.

The biggest thing that I noticed held consistency throughout this whole movie was the color green associated with the public choice in president. Every where you see a supporter you see green. Green almost symbolizes their freedom and we see how violently that it is suppressed.

I really enjoyed this movie, it had a lot of close call moments that kept the viewer interested and ties in directly with what is going on at the time of the elections. However the one thing I would have wished was for the movie to not be in English. I would have preferred to read subtitles then to have to listen to this movie in English as it distracts from the value that this movie could have.