Unruled Paper (, Kāghaz-e bi Khatt) is a 2002 Iranian film directed by Nāser Taghvā'i (his first after twelve years), based on an original script by Nāser Taghvā'i and Minoo Farsh'chi. The film was produced in 2001 by Yektā Film.
The principal roles in the film are played by Khosrow Shakibai (Jahāngir) and Hadyeh Tehrani (Royā). For his role, Khosrow Shakibai was nominated for the Crystal Phoenix Award, in the category of men, at the 20th Fajr International Film Festival in 2001, received the second Best Actor Of The Year Award From Writers and Critics, in the category of men, in 2002, and was awarded the Golden Tablet from Iran Actor Site in 2003. Hadyeh Tehrani's acting in this film has been praised by many critics as equally superb and laudable. For her role, she was nominated for the Crystal Phoenix Award, in the category of women, at the 20th Fajr International Film Festival in 2001. The title of the film is derived from a remark by Royā that she never was able to write neatly on a ruled paper, but this changed when she wrote on unruled paper, thus giving voice to the blessings of freedom.
The film, with a strong cast of Iranian actors, received critical acclaim in Iran: Various critics have described the movie's dialogues as pithy and thought-provoking, and the language used as both natural and powerful. The quality of the acting and directing have both been praised as well. Taghvā'i attempts to pay attention to the most minute details of the film (for instance, the accuracy with which the separate consecutive shuts match, or the precision of the angles at which the communicating actors look away from the camera). As Tahmineh Milani once has noted, accuracy of presentation is one of the hallmarks of Nāser Taghvā'i's films. The dialogues of the film are replete with terse remarks and critical commentaries on the contemporary political and social conditions prevailing in Iran.
Plot
The film starts with a scene of a sitting room, empty of people, at some two minutes to 7 o'clock in the morning, and ends with a scene of the same empty room at some two minutes past 7 o'clock in the morning of some weeks later; this passage of time is accurately depicted by the brightness of the natural light that is reflected on the wall of a corridor, that leads to this sitting room, in the initial and final scenes. The meticulous attention that Taghvā'i has given to the accurate representation of even the most mundane aspects of the film would at first sight seem to be at odds with the fact that with the exception of the opening and closing scenes, in all other scenes where the clock on the wall of the sitting room is in sight, its pendulum is conspicuously motionless. The opening scene depicts some moments before the family starts a very active day (the day at which the two children of the family, Shangul and Mangul, have their first school-day after the summer school-holiday) and the closing scene, the end of a protracted Friday night, during which Jahāngir and Royā have spent an intellectually and emotionally exhausting night. The motionless pendulum suggests that the events in the intervening period have taken place out of time, or only in imagination. Although the work presented by Taghvā'i certainly qualifies as a surrealist art-form, this motionless pendulum serves as a more profound tool than a means that solely hints at surrealism. Taghvā'i conveys a number of unobtrusive verbal and visual messages to his viewers. Briefly, Taghvā'i and Ms Minoo Farsh'chi, the co-author of the film script, variously refer to the theory of eternal recurrence, as revived by e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, with a strong emphasis on the importance of having a creative mind thereby to forge room for free will in at least an imaginative world.