The New York-based Iranian director Amir Naderi has been honored with the lifetime achievement award of the Iranian Short Film Association (ISFA). He was decorated with the honor last week on Tuesday during the closing ceremony of the 8th edition of the ISFA Independent Short Film Festival in Tehran. He could not attend the ceremony and the award was presented to him in his office in the United States by Iranian filmmaker Anahita Ghazvinizadeh. In a video published by the ISFA, Naderi, the director of the acclaimed movie, “The Runner”, expressed his thanks to the organizers of the festival and…
Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors
The Toronto International Film Festival says the talent of two Iranian actresses denied entry to Canada is shining nonetheless as their film screens for audiences this weekend. Tehran-born, Montreal-based director Sadaf Foroughi says the Canadian embassy in Turkey prevented the teens from attending Friday’s TIFF premiere of “Ava.” But Foroughi says “the girls and I are looking forward to our future screenings and lots of other good things which I’m sure will come” for the film, a Canadian co-production with Iran and Qatar. https://youtu.be/P_3_TPSY_Hg The film’s publicist notes that Mahour Jabbari, 17, and Shayesteh Sajadi, 18, received near-identical letters doubting…
Blending elements of magical realism, political strife and Kafkaesque ennui to partially satisfying effect, Oblivion Verses (Los Versos del Olvido) marks an intriguing if rather elusive feature debut for Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami. Set in an unknown Latin American state (the film was presumably shot in Chile), there are moments that recall Pablo Lorrain’s second feature, Post Mortem, which also dealt with morgues, death squads and the trauma of unclaimed corpses in a corrupted land. But here, the narrative is much more opaque, pushing viewers to clutch at straws in order to follow Khatami’s different plot strands, which shuttle between reality and fantasy…
Iranian drama No Date, No Signature , a drama about a coroner who comes to believe he has caused a child’s death, took two prizes in Horizons, Vahid Jalilvand received Best Director and Navid Mohamadzadeh won Best Actor in this category. Alireza Khatami’s Los Versos Del Olvido (co-production of Chile, France, Netherlands and Germany ) won Best Screenplay Award in Horizon, Juries Special Best Film Award and Inter Award. Guillermo del Toro’s lyrical period fairy tale, The Shape Of Water, was crowned with the top prize Golden Lion here tonight at the Venice Film Festival. The Mexican filmmaker’s fantasy splashed down on the Lido last…
The ceremony of Venice City Award 2017 was held on September 6th in Mestre -Venice where the winner of the award is officially announced. BEHIND VENICE LUXURY- a Hazara in Italy pictures the struggles of a Hazara refugee who came to Italy ten years ago and despite all problems for refugees in this country, today he is integrated into Italian society. Before this Hazara refugee, decades back Italy had received two Afghan Royal families as refugees; King Amanullah Khan’s family and King Zahir Shah’s family escaped to Italy. Each of these two royal families had played a role in Hazaras’…
After the 2010 triumph of Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky is back in Venice with another dark picture. Mother! could be summed up as “Jennifer Lawrence walks around a house while really crazy s**t happens”, but of course there’s so much more than that. A couple (the names are never told) lives in a countryside house so that he – a poet (Javier Bardem) – can find inspiration again. One day a stranger knocks at the door (Ed Harris), and soon his wife too (a marvellous Michelle Pfeiffer); from that moment on, a series of increasingly disturbing events take place. It’s a slow descent…
Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who has been detained on Manus Island for four years, has asked for a visa to the UK after his film shot within Australia’s offshore detention regime was accepted to play at the London film festival next month. Boochani is co-director of the film Chauka, Please Tell us the Time, which debuted at the Sydney film festival in June to widespread acclaim. The film was produced in collaboration with Iranian-Dutch film-maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, who took footage secretly shot by Boochani on camera phone within the detention centre to create a full-length feature narrative. The name…
T he 19th celebration of House of Cinema, which selects the best in Iranian movies released locally in the past year, has announced nominees in various categories. Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning ‘The Salesman’ and Narges Abyar’s ‘Breath’ lead the list with 10 nominations and are followed by ‘Subdued’ directed by Hamid Nematollah which is nominated in nine categories, the Telegram channel of Cinema Daily reported. Next in line are Reza Mirakarimi’s ‘Daughter’, Mahammad Hossein Mahdavian’s ‘Midday Adventure’ and Reza Dormishian’s ‘Lantouri’. An interesting point about the list of candidates, which covers 20 categories, is that there is no mention of two…
The Toronto International Film Festival has downsized a bit for its 42nd edition, running Sept. 7 to 17, but the buzz about its film offerings roars as loudly as always. In fact, our 17th annual “Chasing the Buzz” poll of the most eagerly anticipated movies at TIFF identified 25 films offering particular cinematic sustenance, up one from last year’s 24, and that’s out of a feature lineup that’s been pared to 255-plus movies, down from 296 in 2016. No one movie dominated the polling of the Star’s 31-member panel of critics, programmers, professors and regular film buffs. But six films…
In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s wartime epic Dunkirk, which was released in July, the long-simmering debate about the respective merits of film and digital is again coming to the boil. In interviews, Nolan has wasted no opportunity to proclaim the superiority of film over digital. He lets everyone know that Dunkirk was shot on film, much of it using IMAX cameras. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, strongly tipped for awards nominations for his work on the movie, likewise champions the benefits of old-fashioned film. In the mad scramble to convert cinemas for digital projection, van Hoytema argues that the industry has been contributing to…