Shots Seen Around the World

No passport is required for the touring Global Lens series, with features from China, Indonesia, India, and other countries (most play on at least two evenings). Opening night is the South African Bunny Chow, about stand-up comics in chaotic, newly multicultural Johannesburg. Next week, the Iranian The Fish Fall in Love is a foodie flick in which a female-run restaurant is threatened, or so it seems, by the return of the rightful owner of the house where the four women live and cook. Who is this handsome, mysterious visitor, and why does the proud restaurant proprietress (Roya Nonahali, pictured below at right) watch him so warily? Her daughter is determined to find out, winning his confidence with tray after tray of her mother’s exquisite food. Unlike most Iranian cinema, Fish is set in the colorful, Caspian south, where women show more hair and the sexes mix easily without a dour mullah in sight. See SIFF Web site for full schedule. (NR)
Fri., March 21, 8 p.m., 2008