Vital: A Fraught Drama on the Brutality of Living for a Price

Amir Zargara’s Vital, co-written with Gabe Berry, is a drama tying together two parents of different dying children in a bind of ethics, poverty, and exploitation. Pushed to sell and buy organs, they each encounter the edge of how much they can squeeze out of themselves and others in order to save someone more important. Fourteen minutes expand into a fully realised world inhabited by characters defined by lack. By the time we meet them, desire sparked by lack has already congealed into cold despair.

Fereshteh (Mahtab Servati, There Is No Evil) is already minus one kidney. There is always the liver, though, which you can chop off and still have enough remaining to grow it fresh. Her cousin (Hossein Soleimani, Terrestrial Verses) can always find buyers. Fereshteh’s gaze turned towards a little daughter (Narshin Paknahad) wasting away in the hospital, she has staked the last of her hope on it. But anyway, when she finds out that she should never have relied on it, the coolness of the lighting simply cannot go any colder. The film runs on an environment of secrecy and restraint; no one looks at one another unless they have to, or speak louder than they need to. So Fereshteh’s anguish never attempts to surface beyond conversational volume. People sell off parts of their body everyday in her world, it cannot be cried about every time.

But out in the US, medical doctor Dariush (Reza Akhlaghirad, The Seed of the Sacred Fig) is torn between doing the right thing and doing the urgent thing. He, too, has a daughter in the hospital, languishing on a sluggish waitlist for a heart. Connected by a tenuous line of love, Fereshteh and Dariush occupy the extreme ends of choice. One has only to say yes to life, the other can only say yes to death. By the time their paths cross, it has turned Fereshteh into a grim figure of death akin to Sheila Vand’s The Girl. It should scare anyone. Servati, in silence as with words, keeps the film feverish with an immense depth of feeling. Her scenes with Soleimani—the seller and the broker—are the beating heart of the film, the location of its most acute insight. The film is rarely as piercing as when Fereshteh and Shaheen negotiate the price of Hedieh’s life.

Tragedies are about the grand significance of futile action. Characters may never change fate any more than they can abandon the effort, because tragedies valorise the suffering and the trying. In that final moment of failure, it holds up all that suffering and says, Look, this sorrow and this blood and this destruction is the most important thing. It will not be ignored. The end will not erase the means because tragedies refuse to ignore the price characters pay. Tragedies hold the effort of their characters and rank it above all else, victory or defeat. And it is what real life does not afford most people. When the realist tone of Vital mates with the tragedy of the story, it produces a barely restrained grief that does not afford you true catharsis. It bestows you with the duty to hold the anguish in a hush within yourself. Your duty is to witness Fereshteh’s grief. Under systems of oppression and exploitation, this is the most we can offer, short of mutiny.

Watch Vital Short Film Trailer