American Cinematographer - September 2011 - 18

Left: Hubbard at work on the set. Right: The mood in Atafeh’s home darkens considerably after Shireen marries Atafeh’s brother, a Muslim fundamentalist.

neighborhood, they had rigged a lamp three stories up perfectly safely,” says Hubbard. “I knew they’d had to talk all the neighbors into it, and I thought, ‘This guy is politic — he’s a solver.’” Throughout the shoot, Hubbard and Khamis managed to communicate through diagrams and gestures. The cinematographer recalls, “My first AC, Fernando Gayetsky, and I kept a little black notebook by the camera. He had all the lenses in Arabic, and we had all the lighting details in Arabic. But ZuZu and I just had a shorthand. With the five Arabic words I learned, combined with a little French and a few English words, we figured it out.” The look of Circumstance evolves as the story progresses and takes a dark turn. “For the first part of the story, we wanted to capture the idea of youth and energy within an environment that doesn’t allow that,” says Keshavarz. Color was one means of achieving this. “There’s definitely a color arc in the story, with warm light used to create different moments of rebellion,” says Hubbard. “In the beginning, there are a lot of neutrals, blue and green, especially in places like the school courtyard. The girls’ homes are not a riot of color either, but they’re very warm. I tried to keep the colors not easily identifiable hues.” By contrast, the party scenes feature vivid colors. “The clubs are a relief from the
18 September 2011

exterior world,” says Hubbard. The lighting for these scenes progresses from simple multicolored lights in an apartment to a kaleidoscopic QuickTime light display on LED panels in an underground nightclub. Meanwhile, Atafeh’s home transforms from a light, airy space to a claustrophobic, cave-like one as Mehran asserts control over the family. “A lot of that arc had to do with lens selection, blocking and locations,” says Hubbard. The spacious living room is initially seen in wide shots, and dolly shots throughout the space suggest a sense of freedom. As the mood becomes oppressive, “there’s a progression from wide shots and wider lenses to tighter shots and longer focal lengths,” says Hubbard. A particularly dramatic scene, showing Atafeh returning home from the police station and seeing her family brokering her brother’s marriage to Shireen, “was shot in details rather than wides.” Likewise, for scenes featuring the ill-matched newlyweds, “we tried to crowd the frames as much as possible,” says Keshavarz. “They’re like tigers trapped in a cage.” Shireen and Atafeh’s lesbian fantasies have their own unique look. Slick and highly saturated, they were intended to emulate advertising. “Iranians their age are so influenced by Western media,” Keshavarz observes. One fantasy suggests a seaside
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resort in Dubai, where the women shed their clothes in a sunlit room with floor-toceiling windows. “There’s so much glass it’s almost an exterior,” notes Hubbard, who shot the scene on 7217. “Our shot sees the horizon line. The idea is that they can be intimate in a completely open space. We wanted the audience to feel a sense of release.” He adds that he balanced the light with indirect HMIs and negative fill. Needing a seaside location with a high-end look, the producers rented a restaurant in Byblos and cordoned off a private area. But at one point, someone phoned the authorities. “They thought we were making a porn film,” says Keshavarz. “We purposefully scheduled that scene on the last day of the shoot, figuring that if we had to reshoot it in Miami, we could.” Hubbard’s solution was to put the authorities behind the camera. “Inviting them to see what you’re shooting always works,” he says. “They’re always wowed — it’s very Hollywood. We convinced them the girls were trying on dresses.” The stakes were particularly high that day: dozens of cans of unprocessed film were sitting on set. The filmmakers had been shipping negative to FotoKem in Burbank, Calif., every few days, but a series of Islamic holidays had interfered with the shipping schedule. “We actually had 14 days’ worth of film on set when the police

American Cinematographer - September 2011

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