Author: Hamed Sarrafi

Hamed Sarrafi is a London-based freelance film critic and journalist a. He used to be a member ‎of the International Federation of Journalists and over a span of 16 years, have ‎been covering many acclaimed global film festivals such as ‎London ‎Film Festival, along with interviewing prominent filmmakers such as ‎Mike Leigh, Walter Murch, László Nemes, Ken Loach, Ben Sharrock, and Cristi Puiu, through self-produced weekly podcasts ‎and feature articles (https://www.mixcloud.com/hsarrafi/‎). ‎His ‎articles has appeared ‎in numerous acclaimed Iranian magazines and newspapers ‎for the past 19 years. He is also the writer of ‎a film blog in Farsi, ‎https://hsarrafi.com.

The 68th London Film Festival, like the past three years, unfolded against a backdrop of profound grief and relentless turmoil. In 2021, the loss of Hamidreza Sadr, the influential Iranian film critic, cast a sombre shadow over the festival, followed by the harrowing youth protests of 2022 in Iran, where countless lives were shattered in the fight against injustice and for freedom. Last year, tragedy struck anew with the unsolved murders of Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, alongside a wave of loss within Iranian cinema, marked by the deaths of beloved actors and the devastating suicide of director…

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For Andreas Fontana’s full-length feature debut as a director, Azor, he’s chosen to plunge straight into a time of dirty politics and the dictatorship in 1980 Argentina, where wealth insulates the elite. Talking in-depth with Hamed Sarrafi, the Argentine writer-director says he loves collaborating with friends like co-writer Mariano Llinas and using a mix of seasoned and non-professional actors – and he was pragmatic enough to get Swiss funding and place a Geneva banker at the center of the plot – but he also admits he’s something of a control freak. He deliberately interviewed some of the worst people imaginable…

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