Author: Narges Samadi

I made a great effort to attend the Opening Night screening of No Good Man directed by Shahrbanoo Sadat with my son. I wanted him to experience every dimension of a strong and meaningful film festival , one that supports young filmmakers and discovers new cinematic voices. Watching this film was profound and multilayered for me: a woman, a mother, a cinematographer, a government employee, a broken marriage , and a world of love. Nora is in love. Every cell in her body breathes to create, to mother, to resist. The deeply rooted culture of patriarchy in countries such as…

Directed by Valérie Donzelli, At Work offers a calm, precise, and deliberately anti-melodramatic portrayal of one of the fundamental crises of contemporary life: the moment when creativity can no longer sustain living. Having previously screened at the Venice Film Festival, the film will continue its international journey with a presentation in New York as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a context that further consolidates its position among socially engaged and artistically driven works of French cinema. The film follows Paul, a 42-year-old writer who, despite cultural recognition, finds himself in a precarious economic situation. Struggling to complete his third…

The documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street is not merely the record of a local protest or a brief confrontation with immigration authorities and the police. It is a living document of collective memory, one deeply rooted in the civic and moral history of Glasgow and Scotland. A memory carried across generations, reactivated at a critical moment, and transformed into action. On the morning of Eid, in one of Glasgow’s most diverse neighborhoods, two men, a father and his son who had lived in the community for over a decade, were suddenly detained during an early-morning immigration raid, facing imminent deportation.…

The documentary Riefenstahl (2024), directed by Andres Veiel, examines the life of Leni Riefenstahl through a critical lens. She is a filmmaker whose name has remained suspended in the history of cinema between artistic admiration and moral condemnation. The film traces her career from celebrated works such as Triumph of the Will and Olympia to the final years of her life, and for the first time makes use of her personal archive, including home movies, letters, notes, and private conversations. The central question it raises is whether Riefenstahl was merely an apolitical artist or whether she knowingly placed her talents…

Why do international film festivals prefer to view Iran through Jafar Panahi’s lens rather than Saeed Roustaee’s? The choice between these two cinematic visions is not merely aesthetic; it reveals deeper cultural, political, and ideological expectations placed on Iranian cinema by global institutions. Yet the consequences of this preference are often overlooked. Roustaee emerges from the bruised, exhausted margins of Iranian society, where poverty, humiliation, and unspoken trauma shape daily existence. His cinema speaks of women’s suffering not as metaphor or symbol but as lived reality. Panahi, though fighting for the same ideals of freedom, comes from a middle-class background…

Trifole establishes its world from the earliest moments as a story about the slow disappearance of a way of life, one rooted in the Langhe region of Italy, where the tradition of truffle hunting has been passed down for generations and now stands on the verge of extinction. The narrative centers on Igor, an aging truffle hunter whose knowledge of the land runs deep, and his granddaughter Dalia, a teenager who returns to the family home not with her mother, now a busy surgeon who left the village years ago, but in her place to assist her grandfather. This setup…

Little Trouble Girls (2025) The film begins with a sensory confrontation of hearing; a chain of whispered, prayer-like murmurs creates a mysterious, almost sacred atmosphere. A voice emerging from the inner world of a young girl transforms, under the cold light of the rehearsal hall, into an image: a painting on a simple ceramic tile showing red lips. At first glance, it seems to depict the beauty of femininity, yet beneath the surface lies the symbolic mouth of sexual awakening. Around it, tools of labor and war intertwine with signs of male sexuality, an emblem of a long history that…

François Truffaut’s The Soft Skin (1964) at first glance seems to tell a story of infidelity, yet it is, in truth, an exquisite study of form, time, and the act of seeing. Unlike the vibrant energy of the French New Wave, Truffaut turns here toward silence, order, and the details of modern life. Having conducted his long conversation with Hitchcock the year before, Truffaut pays homage to his mentor through every shot of this film. Camera movements, MacGuffins, motifs, and meticulously composed frames distance him from his earlier work, Truffaut slowly steps away from the New Wave toward a cinema…

Paul Anderson’s latest film makes it clear from the very first moment that it has no intention of belonging to the Hollywood mainstream. By tackling themes such as structural racism, political violence, and gendered exploitation, the film situates itself within the tradition that critics and theorists have described as Third Cinema, a mode of filmmaking defined in the 1960s and 1970s by figures like Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, aimed not at consumer entertainment but at exposing mechanisms of power and mobilizing critical consciousness. With unflinching boldness, the film confronts these dark mechanisms, most strikingly in the harrowing scene of…

At first glance, Cause of Death: Unknown by Ali Zarnegar، seems to tell a straightforward story: seven passengers caught in the stillness of a night journey. Yet beneath this simple surface lies a powerful and unsettling exploration of social prejudice and the machinery of “othering.” When the passengers swiftly assume that the unidentified corpse belongs to an Afghan, the assumption is not a casual remark—it becomes the mechanism by which they establish a sense of superiority and even justify taking the victim’s possessions. The implication is stark: because the body belongs to a migrant “other,” his life and belongings carry…