In his first feature Conference of the Birds, director Amin Motallebzadeh borrows a title from a revered source: 12th-century Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar’s allegorical poem The Conference of the Birds, in which a horde of birds embark on a quest to find the mythic Simorgh to serve as their leader, yet come to the ultimate discovery that they already contain the mystical bird within themselves. The purpose of this reference is clear in the basic narrative conceit of Motallebzadeh’s film, in which a prominent football club struggles to find a path forward after the sudden death of their coach. Dispensing with anything resembling a conventional three-act structure, Motallebzadeh films the discombobulated members of the club in isolated, cryptic moments as they process their unsettled present and uncertain future. Unlike the avian pilgrims of Attar’s poem, the characters populating Motallebzadeh’s film have no quest to pursue, and they cannot even make sense of their present reality.
Motallebzadeh noted that the film was not built around a pre-determined narrative, but instead was built around a collaborative process and, sometimes, was influenced by external circumstances: “… we made the film—not from a fixed idea or plot, but rather backwards, by responding to what came up during the process. For instance, the coach’s death only came up after we lost the actor we had cast. Looking back at the footage we had shot so far, that absence made sense—it was already there.” This semi-improvisatory, patchwork approach is evident in the film’s presentation. The film consists of a series of immaculately staged events—some idiosyncratic group activities, some more solitary happenings—that occupy an uncertain space between the mundane and utterly strange. These include a press conference where the interim coach, through a translator, responds to a question about the coach’s death by dejectedly stating “I only know what I don’t understand,” a team training exercise shot to appear like a vigorously athletic and precisely choreographed dance, and an interminable verbal reading of a player’s contract.
Motallebzadeh does not stitch these scenes together with obvious narrative threads, and generally does not even give his characters names, instead allowing the audience to make connections between characters and events as they slowly unfurl. The cast acts in a uniformly somnolent style, speaking slowly and pausing frequently, with minimal facial expressions and vocal inflections. This style distances the viewer from the actors, and instead draws attention to their physical movements — particularly in a number of scenes featuring repetitive motions, including Muslim prayer and stretching exercises — and their often-cryptic, sparse dialogue, which is sometimes repeated by different characters in different contexts.
As Motzabellah has described, the “film moves in circles rather than lines.” With its spartan aesthetic and repetitious, diffuse narrative, Conference of the Birds can alternately be difficult to parse and mysteriously absorbing. A cumulative effect of spiritual isolation builds over its duration — notably, religion is a motif in the film, with several of the characters being practicing Muslims — that stands in ironic contrast to the collective nature of a team sport. In this respect, Conference of the Birds is an impressive subversion of how sports are usually portrayed on film, with a team coming together to prepare for a big game that ends in an inspiring win. This film does build to a climactic game, but for enigmatic reasons, the team doesn’t even show up. Their interim coach had previously advised them to act like “shadows” to gain an advantage over their competition, doling out the advice to “play like you don’t exist.” This message, of course, carries existential implications beyond the playing of a game of football, and is paralleled in the elusiveness of the film itself. Before Conference of the Birds can be fully grasped, the film slips away, leaving one as unmoored as its searching characters.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.