MELODY written, directed and produced by Behrouz Sebt Rasoul is 2025 Tajikistan’s Oscar Entry.
Melody is a musician who teaches music to children with cancer. The children have a celebration at the end of autumn and ask Melody to compose a piece with the sounds of 30 birds for 30 kids with cancer. Melody goes to her fatherly village to record the sound of birds, where she encounters bird hunters. Helped by her mute servant Mengo who lives in her village house, Melody follows the birds.
Here is diretor’s statement about MELODY:
They manage to find only 20 birds and are forced to stop. Mango does not know where other birds live and says only an old singer knows their place. The old man, however, has been expelled from the village by bird hunters, lives alone, and does not welcome any visitor.
Mango fears darkness, but on the day a wedding is held in the village, he goes into the well to rescue a child who has fallen in it and loses his life. Melody has to find the old singer. The old man does not welcome her, but she convinces him. The old man teaches Melody how to communicate with birds, and Melody asks the old man to return to the village. The old man tries to go to the village a few times, but the hunters attack him with sticks and rocks. Melody practices to communicate with birds, and the old man practices singing to get back to the village. The old man goes to the village, and when the hunters are about to attack him, Melody, a child with cancer, and the villagers back up him, and the hunters retreat.
Melody finds 29 birds. To find the 30th bird, the old man tells Melody that she must stay awake all night to hear the bird at sunrise. Melody falls asleep and does not find the old man in the morning. She searches everywhere to find the old man until she approaches a shed she could never go near before because a ferocious dog guarded it. This time, however, the dog is quite calm, and Melody enters the shed. The old man has hidden all birds that Melody had looked for with so much hardship. The old man and the children with cancer enter the shed and Melody sees all children have gathered outside the shed in festive clothes. The old man tells Melody that she was the 30th bird and she should now finish the piece. Melody picks up her instrument, sits amongst the children, and plays the last song..
Behrouz Sebt Rasoul is a filmmaker , screenwriter , editor, photographer. Also, he is an Iranian musician and the author of 2 novels.
Born in Tehran, Iran on 7 july 1970, he graduated from the Karaj University of Industrial Engineering .He started his career by making short films and documentary films. He has made three shorts and and 1300 minutes of documentary film.
He is an independent director who has made all her films with personal expenses and the stories of her films are about human issues.
In 2013, he left her industrial engineering job and founded, the film company Nama Film and is managing it until now.
Sebt Rasoul made her first feature film called Identity in 2015 and won the best film award at CMS Children’s Festival of India and was screened at various festivals such as Dhaka and Chennai.
He made his second feature film called Gogi in 2020. The subject of his film is about a director who has to finish his final sequence but is locked in his house.
he has made 3 documentaries about music, 1 documentary about wildlife, and 28 episodes of documentaries about people’s culture and nature All of which he photographed himself.