Plot:
Abbas Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, travel to Kampala, Uganda at the request of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development. For ten days, their camera captures and caresses the faces of a thousand children – all orphans – whose parents have died of AIDS. Recording tears and laughter, music and silence, life and death, the film attests to Africa’s sunny resilience in the face of so much suffering and disease.Read More »
Quote:
Made surreptitiously in 1977 just as the Ayatollah Khomeini regime was coming to power, a rough cut of ‘The Sealed Soil” was smuggled out of Iran by the director in a false-bottomed suitcase, and taken to the U.S., where che completed her final cut. The film has never been seen in IranRead More »
Quote:
A stealing happens on a train and it is shown from the perspective of each passenger.Read More »
SYNOPSIS
On a chaotic and congested highway toll interchange, an off-camera toll clerk listens impassively to a humanitarian public service radio broadcast from a Red Crescent spokesperson urging listeners to consider adoption of the many children who have been left orphaned as a result of the recent devastating earthquake in northern Iran. An unnamed, middle-aged film director (Farhad Kheradmand) stops at the tollbooth and inquires about the condition of the main road to Rudbar, having been turned back a day earlier at the intermediate town of Manjil due to the impassability of the route. Accompanied by his son Puya (Puya Pievar), the director is hoping to reach the village of Koker in search of the Ahmadpour brothers: two boys who had appeared in his film, Where is the Friend’s House? (a self-reference to Abbas Kiarostami’s earlier film).Read More »
Quote:
This is a Iranian short film named “The Frozen Rose”. Its story is an excerpt from the movie Khodahafez Rafik meaning Goodbye my Friend (2003) which includes three mini stories. This story is about a young girl named Rukkayah and her deep desire to see her father again who had already been martyred on the frontlines during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). We see at the beginning that when the train which carries Iranian soldiers stops, this little girl is the only one who stands in the same position until the other children move away after having sold their flowers to the soldiers. Every morning she cuts flowers and offers them to the soldier who will be martyred without taking their worth in return. The end of this movie is very powerful and moving. In essence, the whole story relies on the fact that Rukkayah hasn’t accepted that her father has passed away 2 years ago.Read More »
A man falls in love with a stranger woman. The woman has her young lover whom she secretly dates in an uninhabited house. The man discovers that the subject of his affection is in fact his friend’s wife and in despair takes his own life.Read More »
As a mother and daughter struggle to cope with the terrors of the post-revolution, war-torn Tehran of the 1980s, a mysterious evil begins to haunt their home.
Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and her family live amid the chaos of the Iran-Iraq war, a period known as The War of the Cities. Accused of subversion by the post-Revolution government and blacklisted from medical college, she falls into a state of malaise. With Tehran under the constant threat of aerial bombardment, her husband (Bobby Naderi) is drafted and sent to the frontlines by the army, leaving Shideh all alone to protect their young daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi).Read More »
Synopsis:
Darvish Khan, a deaf-mute shepherd living in the desert, has a mystical vision in a dream in which he encounters a saint. When he awakens, he finds himself clutching a large stone. Grateful for the vision, he aims to pay homage and begins to construct an unusual monument in its honor. After his wife tells a neighbor that it is miraculous place, news of his ‘garden of stones’ spreads and people from neighboring villages come to see it. The result wreaks havoc upon Darvish Khan’s life. Bagh-e Sangi won the Silver Bear prize for the best film at the 1976 Berlin Film Festival and was shown at the Tehran, London and Paris film festivals. It was recently included at #20 on a list of the 27 best Iranian films, as selected by 14 Iranian directors for the 2014 Fribourg International Film Festival.Read More »
A man turns to violence after losing those he loves most in this taut drama from Iran. Ali (Rafi Pitts) is a reformed criminal who lives in a small flat in Tehran with his wife Sara (Mitra Hajjar) and their young daughter Saba (Saba Yaghoobi). While he’s grateful for the chance to support his family honestly, Ali doesn’t much care for his job as a night watchman or the noise and stress of city life; Ali heads off to the woods and clears his mind by hunting as often as he can. One day, Ali comes home from work to an empty apartment; he has no idea when his family has gone, and when they don’t return, he goes to the police. Read More »