Imprisoned Iranian Filmmakers Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof Say ‘Hope of Creating Again’ Has Become a ‘Reason for Existence’

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.

CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour said that she declined to do an interview with Iran’s president in New York after one of his staffers informed her that she would be required to wear a headscarf.

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.

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 When the definitive book on dissident filmmaking is written, it will have at least several chapters and a lengthy appendix dedicated to Iran’s Jafar Panahi, who has now covertly made five astonishingly resourceful features since being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian authorities in 2010. But given those circumstances, perhaps the biggest ongoing surprise of his career has been just how lively his illegally shot films have been — even while, as metafictions, they refer continually to the hampered circumstances of their creation. “No Bears,” which premieres in competition in Venice, certainly starts in that register, with a rugpull or two and handful of seriocomic, absurdist observations on the foibles of Iranian village life. But then, as though it were anticipating the worsening political situation which culminated in Panahi’s detention in July 2022 for a six-year prison sentence, the mood darkens, prior to an ambiguous but devastating finale which seems to even include the director’s own tendency toward playfulness in its critique. If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, “No Bears” is where he slams on the brakes. 

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.

Sareh was one of two LGBTIQ women sentenced to death in Iran

EXCLUSIVE: Iranian-British director and artist Mehdi Norowzian has just wrapped the Iran shoot of his new drama A Time In Eternity starring Venice 2022 jury member Leila Hatami, best known for her roles in A Separation, The Pig and Imagine.

Korea’s Busan International Film Festival (October 5-14) has announced its full line-up, including opening film Scent Of Wind, directed by Iran’s Hadi Mohaghegh, while Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai will be honoured as Asian Filmmaker Of The Year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the Hong Kong star of “In The Mood For Love” and Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” has been named Asian Filmmaker of the Year by the Busan International Film Festival. Leung will collect his award at the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct. 5. 2022. The festival will open with a screening of “Scent of a Wind” by Iranian director Hagi Mohaghegh. Busan organizers said that the festival will play a total of 243 films (features and shorts) from 71 countries and territories. These include 89 world premieres and 13 international premieres.

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.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Iranian cinema is having a great year despite the many impediments film directors face there, including being jailed. Reflecting this burst of irrepressible cinematic energy, after strong showing of Iranian cinema at Berlin, Cannes and Karlovy Vary, Venice has five films from the country, two of which are in competition. Also, Leila Hatami, star of Cannes festival jurist Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” is a member of Venice’s main jury panel. “We have never received so many submissions from Iran, and many of them are good,” says Venice chief Alberto Barbera. He notes that “the paradox is that this is happening at a time when the Iranian regime is among the most rigidly conservative and repressive in the world,” and is responding to uprisings sparked by the country’s harsh economic conditions by re-incarcerating directors such as Jafar Panahi, whose latest film “No Bears” launches from Venice, fellow dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, and others “who try to freely express their opposing points of view.”