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A beautifully moving story of an old man driving in the busy streets of Tehran. At the traffic lights he notices a young girl who is sad in the back seat of her parent’s car, they are too busy arguing. Old man intervenes and give’s his wife’s flowers to the young couple to stop them from arguing. We only realise how important those flowers were to the old man when he drives off.Read More »
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Rahim is in prison because of a debt he was unable to repay. During a two-day leave, he tries to convince his creditor to withdraw his complaint against the payment of part of the sum. But things don’t go as planned.Read More »
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Her poetic two-channel video installation Tooba is based on the Koran, in which Tooba, the sacred tree of paradise, offers shelter and sustenance to those in need. Neshat’s video places a woman within a groove in the trunk of a large fig tree, symbolising its soul. They stand, alone, in a stone-walled garden set in a mountainous landscape. Men and women draw near and enter the enclosure, seeking refuge, as the Tooba-woman disappears into the Tooba-tree. The piece is ambiguous. Who has agency? Is it the crowd, who ‘invade’ the garden or the tree-woman who draws them towards her like a magnet? Tooba is dedicated to Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipour, whose novel Women without Men concerns five women sojourning in a garden, one of whom is transformed into a tree.Read More »
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Rapture is an installation of two synchronized black-and-white video sequences that are projected on opposite walls; large in scale, they evoke cinema screens. Working with hours of footage and a team of editors, the artist constructed two parallel narratives: on one side of the room, men populate an architectural environment; in the other sequence, women move within a natural one. The piece begins with images of a stone fortress and a hostile desert, respectively. The fortress dissolves into a shot of over one hundred men—uniformly dressed in plain white shirts and black pants—walking quickly through the cobblestone streets of an old city and entering the gates of the fortress. Simultaneously, the desert scene dissolves into a shot of an apparently equal number of women, wearing flowing, full-length veils, or chadors, emerging from different points in the barren landscape.Read More »
Jean Rouch’s camera follows his friend, filmmaker/actor/critic Farrokh Ghaffari, as he walks and talks us through the famous Shah Mosque in Esfehan. While guiding him and answering his questions, Ghaffari makes Rouch discover the beauties of the architecture of the mosque and its impact on the city. Throughout the tour, they discuss Islam’s complex relationship with death, sex and cinema.Read More »
Sara is the perfect young housewife, eager to serve. When husband Hessam requires an expensive emergency operation abroad, it is she who get the funds. For the next three years, it is Sara, labouring secretly to pay the shady loan and save Hessam’s manly pride. Until the truth is revealed and with it, the reality of her marriage.Read More »
In an Iranian juvenile detention center, a group of adolescent girls serve their sentence for the grave crime of murdering their father, their husband or another male family member. Filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei built a remarkable relationship with these inmates, whose frank conversations and playful interactions he observes, and who privately open up about the consequences of, and sometimes the reasons for, their action.
Occasionally he leaves them alone with the camera, allowing it to become a tool for them to address both their victims in the afterlife and their accomplices—three of the girls committed their father’s killing together with their mothers, who are now on death row.Read More »
Jafar Panahi sets out to find a young woman with a golden voice that has been forbidden to sing by Iranian authorities.Read More »
Author Golrokh Kamali has left her husband and has been living with her parents in the provinces for the past year. When she returns to the capital city, she finds out that her husband has gone bankrupt and that a group of unscrupulous businessmen are threatening to imprison him for debt. Although still angry about her husband’s past infidelities, and in spite of her previous pessimistic views about life with him, she comes to his defense and tries to help him overcome his problem. Starring Mozhdeh Shamsai as Golrokh and Majid Mozaffari as her husband. Nominated for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Female Lead Actress (Mozhdeh Shamsai), Best Male and Best Female Supporting Actors, Best Set Design, and Best Sound at the 19th Fajr Film Festival, where it also won the Audience Choice Award.Read More »