Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is imploring everyone worldwide to unite “in solidarity” with protesters following the death of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s morality police.
06.09.2022 - 12:21 / variety.com
Anna Tatarska Arian Vazirdaftari, whose debut feature “Without Her” (“Bi roya”) was picked up by Berlin-based sales company Picture Tree Intl. and is screening as part of Venice Film Festival’s Horizons Extra section, is no stranger to international festivals. He was a part of Berlinale Talent Campus and his short films screened in Busan, Brussels and Cannes among many others. “I started as a self-taught filmmaker and only landed in film school many years later,” Vazirdaftari says. “My international experiences really helped. I got to know a more professional atmosphere globally, learned about what’s going on in film festivals, how films are selected and distributed.
“There are so many films and filmmakers around the world, so I knew that if I wanted to succeed internationally, I had to have something really special to make a movie about. These experiences made me tougher.”
In “Without Her,” the main protagonist Roya is about to emigrate when she stumbles upon a young, distressed woman, who seems to suffer from memory loss. Roya takes her in and soon after her life starts falling apart. When she finally discovers the woman has come to replace her, it is too late to go back. Shot on Arri Alexa Mini, the story is an inventive genre crossover, where Hitchcockian traits mix with the motif of the double, well known from Brian De Palma’s oeuvre. All with a pinch of Iranian social realist cinema, something that has with time become an Iranian trademark. Vazirdaftari is aware of the stereotypes surrounding Iranian cinema. “We have many great filmmakers who specialize in social realist dramas. The audience and the market are used to that. But young filmmakers are interested in other styles too. “I, for example, grew up
Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is imploring everyone worldwide to unite “in solidarity” with protesters following the death of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s morality police.
Iranian filmmakers have united in penning an open letter to their friends and colleagues across the film industry, requesting their support in defending the rights of Iran’s people.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent As protests continue to erupt in Iran and around the world sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini – the young Iranian woman who died last week while being held in custody by morality police for allegedly wearing a loose headscarf – the country’s film community is intensely engaged and keenly aware that their voices are now even more at risk of being quashed. Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (“A Separation”), who is currently presiding over the Zurich Film Festival jury, has issued a statement and a video appeal urging artists around the world to proclaim their solidarity with the Iranian people who are protesting against the death of Amini.
Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi has penned an open letter to the Academy of Motion Pictures, requesting the Academy defend the civil rights of his country’s people.
killing of Mahsa Amini.On Sept. 16, the 22-year-old was murdered in the nation’s capital for wearing what morality police deemed “immodest clothing.” Authorities denied harming her and claimed she suffered from pre-existing health conditions, which her family disputed.
taking place in Iran right now, let this be your sign to start. Last week, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody sparked a wave of demonstrations across the country. Detained by Iran’s infamous morality police for wearing an “improper hijab,” Amini spent three days in a coma before she was pronounced dead of what police are calling a heart attack.
she had suffered “a heart attack.” Eyewitnesses, though, watching the police beat her—which many believe resulted in her falling into a deadly coma.Her family has also confirmed that Mahsa had never suffered from a heart condition previously, with her father, Amjad Amini, alleging that he had been denied the right to see footage of the arrest (“I asked them to show me the body cameras of the security officers, they told me the cameras were out of battery,” he ) as well as being prohibited from seeing Mahsa’s body, which had been wrapped in a sheet when presented to him—although he claimed to have noticed suspicious bruising on her feet.A previous statement from the director general of forensic medicine in Tehran province, however, that there were “no signs of injuries to the head and face, no bruises around the eyes, or fractures at the base of Mahsa Amini’s skull.” Numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have called for further scrutiny, with President Ebrahim Raisi the UN General Assembly that “if her death was due to negligence, it will definitely be investigated.” On the same day, Raisi–who condemned Iranian protestors for their “acts of chaos”–canceled a with Christiane Amanpour after she declined his last-minute request that she wear a headscarf.This content can also be viewed on the site it from.Many in Iran are understandably dubious about claims that Mahsa’s death occurred naturally. Demonstrations began in Kurdistan province on September 17 following Mahsa’s funeral, and rapidly spread across the country with several clips of Iranian citizens publicly going viral.
Michaela Zee editor CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour revealed that an interview with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Wednesday night was canceled, after she declined the president’s last-minute demand to wear a headscarf. “I politely declined,” Amanpour wrote on Twitter. “We are in New York, where there is no law of tradition regarding headscarves. I pointed out that no previous Iranian president has required this when I have interviewed them outside Iran.” According to Amanpour, an aide told the veteran journalist that President Raisi suggested that she wear a headscarf “because it’s the holy months of Muharram and Safar.”
said in a Twitter thread, when an aide of President Raisi approached her. “The president, he said, was suggesting I wear a headscarf, because it’s the holy months of Muharram and Safar,” she tweeted. “I politely declined.
Alissa Simon Film Critic Overline: Hed: By Alissa Simon “Subtraction,” from idiosyncratic Iranian helmer-writer Mani Haghighi (“Men at Work,” “Modest Reception,” “A Dragon Arrives!”) is a tense Hitchcockian thriller set in Tehran, where a heavy, non-stop rainfall signals a lingering malaise. There, a young couple come across their doppelgängers. The film premiered at the Toronto festival. The idea for the plot grew out of the helmer’s long-ago trip to Southwest Iran to look at places where the Iran-Iraq war took place.
Houman Seyyedi’s darkly comic drama World War III has been named as Iran’s entry for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards, taking place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on March 12th, 2023.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Iranian actor Leila Hatami, best known outside her country for her role in Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning “A Separation,” will soon be back on international movie screens in Iranian-British director Mehdi Norowzian’s metaphysical drama “A Time in Eternity” which recently wrapped in Iran. “There isn’t one scene without me,” Hatami told Variety, speaking on the sidelines of the just concluded Venice Film Festival where she was a member of the main jury. The London-based Norowzian, who was Oscar-nominated for his 1999 short “Killing Joe” and subsequently directed Joseph Fiennes, Elizabeth Shue, Dennis Hopper and Sam Shepherd in the 2002 drama “Leo,” has since become a prominent commercials director. Norowzian recently returned to Iran to shoot this film, which is his first feature after two decades.
Ben Croll Venice’s red carpet became a stage for quiet protest on Friday, as festival director Alberto Barbera and jury president Julianne Moore, among many more, held a somber walk-out to stand in solidarity with imprisoned filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Traffic on the red carpet flowed normally as attendees made their way into Venice’s Palazzo del Cinema for the world premiere of Panahi’s latest film, “No Bears.” And then, at 4:30 pm sharp, the doors to the theater swung open and a sea of people filed out. Moore stood with a delegation that also included fellow juror Audrey Diwan, Horizons jury president Isabel Coixet, and filmmakers Laura Bispuri and Sally Potter.
Venice jury head Julianne Moore joined activists from the International Coalition Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR) in a flash mob on the Venice red carpet Friday evening to call for the release of Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who was detained in Tehran in July.
Every film Jafar Panahi makes is an act of resistance. Currently in jail, the Iranian director has spent the past 12 years in and out of house arrest, banned from traveling or making films outside Iran and faced with numerous obstacles making films at home. That hasn’t stopped him.
Jessica Kiang Nobody emerges unscathed — least of all the audience — from Vahid Jalilvand’s highly effective, deeply unpleasant “Beyond the Wall,” a morbidly violent allegory for the effects of state-sponsored trauma on the individual that places contemporary Iranian society somewhere on the map between the sixth and seventh circles of hell. A strange combination of intricate, almost sci-fi-inflected psychological thriller, splenetic social-breakdown broadside and two-hander (torture) chamber drama, it is an exercise in bravura filmmaking applied to a story so relentlessly grim you might wish it were a little less well-made, giving you an excuse to look away. In his 2017 film “No Date No Signature” (which won Best Director and Best Actor in Venice’s Horizons sidebar), Jalilvand pictured a stratified society teetering on the edge of legality and morality; here, however, it has toppled entirely into the abyss. The only way is down, and the filmmaker is bringing you with it.