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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. 

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.

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.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Tel Aviv-based Donna and Shula Productions and “Tehran” director Daniel Syrkin have set a joint venture to develop TV series for the global market, with an emphasis on the U.S. and Europe. Donna and Shula Productions leaders Dana Eden and Shula Spiegel have shepherded two seasons of the espionage drama series “Tehran” with Syrkin. The series debuted in June 2020 on Israel’s Kan 11 broadcast network. Apple TV+ quickly picked up the show, making it the first non-English series to premiere on the platform. “Tehran” bowed on Apple TV+ in 2021 and the streaming giant partnered with Kan 11 on the production of a second season that premiered in May.

The final two mourners to see the Queen lying in state have said they think they will be friends “forever” after meeting in the queue. Chrissy Heerey, a member of the Royal Air Force, and Sima Mansouri, 55, were the two last people into Westminster Hall on Monday morning.The public viewing ended shortly before 6.30am and the pair became the last of the hundreds of thousands of people who have waited for hours to pay their respects.

Glenn Close had to cancel plans at the 2022 San Sebastian Film Festival due to a family emergency.

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.

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.

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.”

detained by the Iranian government last month. Rasoulof, who is the director of the Berlin Golden Bear winner “There Is No Evil,” was arrested alongside fellow filmmaker Mostafa Aleahmad for posting on social media and participating in protests over a building that had collapsed in the city of Abadan in May.

EXCLUSIVE: Allen Leech (Downton Abbey, Bohemian Rhapsody) and India Mullen (Normal People, Brassic) will lead the cast of an Irish drama series for AMC Networks’ Sundance Now and local broadcaster Virgin Media Television, we’ve learned.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Paris-based company Indie Sales has boarded Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi’s feature debut “A Tale of Shemroon” which is set to premiere in the New Directors competition at San Sebastian. Set in the north of Tehran, “A Tale of Shemroon” follows Iman and his younger brother Payar who live with their father. After the death of their mother, Iman starts a business thanks to his connections with the city’s affluent youth, but these new opportunities bring him on a dangerous path affecting his family’s destiny. “We are proud to be a part of San Sebastian’s New Directors competition with this new voice from Iranian cinema,” said Nicolas Eschbach at Indie Sales. “Emad (Aleebrahim Dehkordi) depicts the reality of the Iranian youth living in parts of Tehran that have seldom been seen before,” Eschbach continued.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor“Bread and Salt,” which has been selected for Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section, has debuted its trailer. The film has been picked up by IKH Pictures Promotion for world sales.The film, the feature debut by director Damian Kocur, follows talented pianist Tymek, a student of the Warsaw Academy of Music, who returns to his home town for a vacation, a place where time has stood still. The central meeting point for local youth is the newly created kebab bar.

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. execs headed to the inaugural Scripted Israel event in LA in September can expect to meet 17 prominent Israeli producers and a host of talent and writers.

who has this month been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for criticising the Iranian government. It takes the form of a road movie, though that Hollywood term doesn’t really cover Hit the Road, which is part of Iranian cinema’s entirely distinct genre of films shot semi-covertly in a car, and has evolved to avoid Iranian state snooping. It is a mode of film-making using the interior possibilities of the car, which is both prop, symbol, mobile location and means of transporting cast and crew about without attracting attention during filming.

EXCLUSIVE: A little known episode during World War II involving three of the most powerful political figures of the time that could’ve changed the future of the Western world is the subject of a limited series in development at Sony Pictures Television starring and produced by Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome. Thriller drama Night Of the Assassins, based on the New York Times bestseller by Howard Blum, comes from Blum, Terminator 3 director Jonathan Mostow, the Emmy-winning Homeland and 24 duo Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa and their executive Glenn Geller.

Tahereh Saeedi, the wife of imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, has described her husband’s recent imprisonment as being tantamount to “a kidnapping”.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentJafar Panahi, the critically acclaimed filmmaker of “Taxi” and “Three Faces,” has been ordered by the Iranian judicial authorities to serve the six-year sentence he was given in 2010. Panahi, who was arrested last week in Tehran, only served two months of that sentence so far.

The International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR), the Amsterdam-based body set up in 2019 to support cinema professionals in danger, has posted an open letter addressing the recent crackdown on Iran’s filmmaking community.

EXCLUSIVE: Television producers Dana Eden and Shula Spiegel and their production company Donna and Shula Productions have signed with CAA. The duo are best known for producing Tehran, the first international series purchased and produced by Apple TV+.

Liraz has announced her third album ‘Roya’ and released new single ‘Azizam’. The record again sees her working with Iranian musicians, who remain anonymous for safety reasons, although on this occasion they managed to work face to face, rather than remotely.Raised in Israel, Liraz used her debut album ‘Naz’ as a way to connect with her Persian roots – mixing tradition and more modern music and singing entirely in Farsi. After the album was released, she found that Iranian musicians, working under the radar of Tehran’s secret police, began getting in touch.Eventually, she and some of those musicians began working together online on what would become her second album, ‘Zan’, which was released in 2020.

Netflix’s cutbacks have worried some in the industry that the content gold rush is ending. Producers at the “IP IQ” panel, sponsored by Deadline, at the Produced By conference, said there’s no need to worry. Girl From Plainville and The Dropout Executive Producer Liz Hannah, A&E Studios Head Barry Jossen, and UTA partner and Co-head of Media Rights Jason Richman said they don’t anticipate any slowdown in streamers needing content.

Vice Puts FAST Channel In Gear On Fox’s Tubi

This year’s dark horse in competition at Cannes is easily “Leila’s Brothers,” Iranian writer-director Saeed Roustaee’s third feature and worthy follow-up to his intense 2019 cop thriller “Just 6.5.” With hints of “The Godfather” and Arthur Miller evident throughout, the drama is a sprawling tale exploring dysfunctional family dynamics, economic hardships, and generational wealth. READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2022 Preview: 25 Must-See Films To Watch “Leila’s Brothers” follows the lives of a Tehran family as they struggle to stay afloat amidst financial hardships and complicated familial relationships.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at LargeThose “specific people” showed up at the Variety offices in costume as the mysterious guards (aka “pink soldiers”) from “Squid Game,” complete with iconic circle/triangle/square masks. They came bearing an invitation to Netflix’s FYSee Emmy events space at Raleigh Studios, along with a box of donuts.The brutal South Korean drama about class, power, wealth and kiddie games clearly remains an awards priority for the streamer — particularly after this year’s SAG Awards garnered wins including male actor (Lee Jung-Jae) and female actor (Jung Ho-yeon).

They all hate each other, Leila (the magnificent Taraneh Alidoosti) tells her brother Alireza (Navid Mohammad Zadeh) when he returns to the family home. It is a rare visit; he works in an industrial plant somewhere on the other side of Iran. He isn’t going to tell his family that he has been laid off with the promise of pay that has never materialized; in the Tehran family that crowds Saeed Roustaee’s long and absorbing clan drama Leila’s Brothers, he is supposed to be the properly functioning son.

The International Coalition For Filmmakers At Risk (ICFR) has demanded “an end to a growing environment of fear and insecurity” in Iran after two documentary creators were arrested then released on bail, preventing them from travelling or working.

EXCLUSIVE: Holy Spider, the Ali Abbasi-directed Iranian serial killer thriller, is nearing a deal for U.S. rights with Utopia, the U.S. sales and distribution firm owned by Robert Schwartzman and Cole Harper. The provocative Cannes Competition film premiered today on the Croisette to strong applause.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentThough Iran is in the throes of a deep economic crisis, battered by hard-line politics and a mismanaged pandemic, it’a shaping up to be a great year for Iranian cinema.Paradoxically, Iran’s cinematic landscape is bursting with powerful, fresh films likely to make an international splash just as talks between Tehran and world powers continue to be deadlocked on reviving the nuclear deal that could lift the country’s crippling sanctions that block exports.This filmmaking fervor is reflected in the fact that Iranian pics have scored two Cannes competition berths, plus one in the Cannes Critics’ Week, which marks Iran’s first presence in this section dedicated to first and second works in almost two decades.

The debut of a Scottish director is one of seven films to be selected for Critic's Week at the Cannes Film Festival in a spectacular moment for Scottish cinema.

Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe has told Boris Johnson how she lived in the “shadow of his words” for “the best part of four-and-a-half years”.

The Israel Film Festival is kicking off in LA this week and it’s going big on television.

By The night before I was due to meet Glenn Close, I didn’t sleep well. Call it nerves or fear—there’s nothing like preparing to interview an actor who has been nominated eight times for an Oscar and won as many Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards—but multiple times in the early hours, I woke sweatily to flashes of Glenn Close as Patty Hewes from Damages, Joan Castleman from The Wife, Albert from Albert Nobbs, Olivia Pace from Le Divorce (obscure, but a personal favorite), Alex Forrest from Fatal Attraction, and Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmations.

Sharareh Drury administratorWith the second season of “Tehran” about to debut on Apple TV+, Niv Sultan admits she’s balancing being scared with having hope for how the series’ continued exploration of the Iran-Israel conflict can open minds versus further stereotypes.“Tehran” first aired on Israel’s public channel Kan 11 in June 2020 and began streaming on Apple TV+ a few months later, gaining a global audience and strong reviews. Season 2 of the tense spy thriller picks up where the first left off, with Sultan’s Tamar Rabinyan, a Mossad agent, hiding in Iran after a risky undercover mission. Glenn Close joins the cast in episodes that begin streaming May 6.What initially drew you to “Tehran”? You can see so many series about the Israeli conflict between Iranians.