Zahra and Massoumeh Naderi

Acute social deprivation

Iranian twins Zahra and Massoumeh Naderi were kept locked away by their father in their house in Iran until neighbours alerted social services, by which time the girls were around 12 years old. Their complete lack of socialisation meant the girls couldn't speak and could barely walk.

Instead of talking, the girls communicated using primitive whimpers and whines. They hadn't bathed in years. In an uncanny parallel to the case of Genie, their mother is blind.

The Apple

Everything changed for the Naderi twins when Samira Makhmalbaf shot The Apple. As she says herself:

"As you see in the film, these two girls at the beginning of the film look like animals. They just make sounds the same as animals. We shot this in 11 days, and during this 11 days, they changed more than during those 11 years, just because of having contact with us."

Starring the twins as themselves, and filmed by the 17-year old daughter of acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, The Apple gives us a glimpse of the life of Zahra and Massoumeh Naderi, and in a mixture of staged scenes and documentary we see the girls start to learn to socialise — as it happens.

Film impacts real life

The story doesn't stop there. Tucked away on the DVD of Blackboards, under the title of The Making of Blackboards, the director Samira Makhmalbaf also tells the story of she made The Apple.

She relates how, wanting to become a director, she made contact with the Naderi family; how the children were taken away by the social services; and how she filmed the attempted re-integration with the family (with the blind mother being particularly difficult, not understanding what the filming was for).

This 80-minute Making of… documentary reveals what finally became of the Naderi twins, and the part that the film played in their destiny.

(Thanks to Karl Catteuw for this information.)