PREVIEW: 2021 IRANIAN FILM FESTIVAL

The 2021 Iranian Film Festival (IFFA) commences its nationwide rollout this week, with ten films in competition as part of this year’s celebration of Iranian film culture. Despite a 12 month period that has proved particularly difficult for international filmmakers, the 10th edition of IFFA features a complex and layered selection of award-winning features from the Islamic Republic.

“We have had a very strong year for Iranian cinema, enabling us to present a fantastic and diverse range of films for our audiences in Australia,” said Festival Director, Armin Miladi. “In particular, we are delighted to present three films from female filmmakers.” 

Foremost among these is the Opening Night film Titi, written, produced and directed by Ida Panahandeh. Steeped in Iranian Gypsy lore, it is the story of a friendship between a hospitalized, critically ill physicist, working on a theory about black holes, and an eccentric hospital housekeeper named TiTi, possessed of supernatural powers that she must use to take her new friend on a mystical odyssey.

A highlight of the IFFA will be writer-director Massoud Bakhshi’s Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness, a searing based-on-fact drama about a young woman, sentenced to death for an act of self-defence, who seeks atonement on live television. The riveting and superbly acted film, which poses a critical moral conundrum born out of a theocratic system that disfavours women, won the Grand Jury Prize (World Cinema Dramatic) at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. 

Other highlights of the capital city screening schedules include The Wasteland (Dasht-E Khamoush; pictured, below right), an incisive look at life on the outskirts of Iranian society focussing on a brick factory supervisor who acts as go-between for the workers and the boss; Majid Majidi’s Sun Children, the story of 12-year-old Ali and his three friends who survive doing small jobs and committing petty crimes to make fast cash; and Shahram Mokri’s Careless Crime (Jenayat-E Bi Deghat; pictured, top), in which a modern-day plot to burn down a movie theatre replicates a historical tragedy that occurred four decades ago, as Iranian society was teetering on revolution.

A sidebar presentation will focus on the culture and music of Southern Iran, the region adjacent to the Persian Gulf, as seen in two rousing documentaries - Raha Faridi’s Chicheka Lullaby, a study of the alternative artist and musician Ebrahim Monsefi, and Mohsen Nesavand’s Sebaloo, which highlights the African music culture of the region and one of its greatest proponents, Mahmoud Bardaknia. The centrepiece of the sidebar will be Manijeh Hekmat’s recent hit, Bandar Band (pictured, above right), a music-infused twist on a road movie that follows a band's day-long journey across a flooded Tehran landscape.

 IFFA 2021 will also honour late director Kambuzia Partovi with a screening of his final film, The Truck (Kamion), the story of a Yazidi woman and her two children escaping an ISIS massacre. Partovi was a writer and co-director, known for Closed Curtain (2013), winner of Best Screenplay at Berlinale 2013; Café Transit (2005), his nation’s submission for the Foreign Film Oscar race; and, his groundbreaking family film Golnar (1989), which used music and puppet animals to help the lives of villagers in rural Iran. The director died on November 24, 2020 in Tehran due to complications from Covid-19.

The 10th Iranian Film Festival unfolds in Perth at Luna Cinemas Leederville, 20 - 26 May; in Brisbane at the Elizabeth Picture Theatre, 27 May - 2 June; at Cinema Nova in Melbourne, 3 - 9 June; and in Sydney at Dendy Newtown, 10 - 16 June. An online version of the festival will be held from 20-30 June 2021 Australia-wide. Full session and ticketing information can be found at the festival’s Official Website.