When the country rises in rebellion against your dictatorial rule, we imagine that could be quite difficult. After a series of failures and atrocities committed to keep power, no one in the world would empathize with the dictator in question. Doing exactly this, however, made for a striking movie in The President. Never naming an actual country, but based generally on real world revolutions, the film plucks a dictator and his grandson into the poverty that his regime has inflicted upon its people. It’s quite cathartic to see the two reap the karmic consequences of what the dictator has done, but it’s also thought-provoking, as the film straightforwardly demonstrates the way revolution eventually takes cyclical form, especially for the movements that allowed the very atrocities they sought to end. It’s not a film with an easy-to-match metaphor, though, given the production country and the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s home country, one could guess certain influences, but The President nonetheless is a striking portrait of a city violently changing hands.
"Looks at the ugliness of the world, but attempts to ask why it's that way."
— David Jenkins
"Even though The President lacks some of the subtlety that made Makhmalbaf's previous work transcendent, this film is still a worthy testament to a fiery storyteller determined to use the medium as a necessary means of subversion."
— Steve Greene
The President is the story of a dictator of an imaginary country in the Caucasus, who is forced to escape following a coup d’état, and begins a journey to discover his country in the company of his five-year-old grandson. The two travel across the lands that the President once governed. Now, disguised as a street musician to avoid being recognized, the former dictator comes into contact with his people, which he comes to know from a different point of view.
With revolution sweeping across the country, a brutal dictatorial president escapes the palace along with his grandson, which leads him to confront the injustices committed by the very regime he used to run.
Naturally, the new perspective. Most films depict the revolutionary’s point of view, not the dictator’s.
No one said anything! - How terrifying this can apply to so many real issues right now.
