AllMovie

Fariborz Kamkari's Black Tape takes the form of The Blair Witch Project -- that of a found videotape -- to tell a harrowing tale of a young woman's sexual slavery. While the film is not particularly graphic by American standards, it packs an undeniable wallop. But the film's power is sometimes hampered, not enhanced, by its intentionally shoddy technique. In Blair Witch, the incessant need of the terrorized trio to document their plight on video was a point that strained credulity. Here, the elliptic nature of the supposed home video use leads to some confusion over who is taping what, and to what end. Goli (Shilan Rahmani), the distraught young Kurdish woman, and Parviz (Parviz Moasesi), her Iranian captor, apparently use the video camera to spy on each other, each even acknowledging that the other is using the camera for the same purpose, which raises the question of why they don't just erase each other's work -- not that that would make the story any easier to follow for the audience. On the other hand, the formal conceit helps keep the action from lapsing into melodrama. The lack of background music and the appropriately sloppy camera work are helpful in this regard. It also gives the video an appropriately bootlegged feel. This isn't a fiction film, one senses, because of a censorious government that would never allow it to be made that way. It was shot on the fly for good reason. The acting is uneven, but Rahmani and Moasesi are fairly solid. Kamkari doesn't cheat much, in terms of exposition, so viewers figure out what's going on gradually. By the time Goli is desperate enough to try to escape from Parviz, the situation is pretty clear. Black Tape is a brutal story, but worth telling.