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In “Tale of the Sea,” the drama of lyrical despair that’s the opening-night film of the 1st Iranian Film Festival New York, the venerable Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara, who wrote and directed the movie and also stars in it, plays Taher, an esteemed novelist who has just spent three years in a mental institution. Farmanara, now in his mid-70s, has a hangdog scowl, small burning eyes, and a jowly fleshy severity that makes him look like a literary-lion version of Charles Laughton. You wouldn’t exactly say his face lights up with feeling, but that doesn’t mean he’s not expressing anything. He has a world-weariness that tips into tenderness, and the silent haunted demeanor of someone who has grown used to seeing ghosts.

Taher is known to his acolytes as “Maestro,” and that word speaks volumes about his changing place in society. Thirty years ago, it...

Tale Of The Sea (Hekayat-e Darya) Reviewed for Shockya.com and BigAppleReviews.net by: Harvey Karten Director: Bahman Farmanara Screenwriter: Bahman Farmanara Cast: Bahman Farmanara, Fatemeh Motemad Arya, Leila Hatami, Saber Abar, Ali Nassirian Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 1/ Opens: January 10, 2019 at the First Iranian International Film Festival in NY: At IFC Center, 323 […]

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InterviewThe acclaimed Iranian filmmaker, who is jury head at the International Film Festival of Kerala, talks to Tnm about the festival, his movies and life.CrisThe conference room door opens unexpectedly and Majid Majidi walks out. Not hurriedly but with calm, easy steps. Something had gone wrong in an interview, some guess. Perhaps the famous Iranian director didn’t like a question, whispered one. A team goes after him in the lobby of Hotel Taj in Thiruvananthapuram and he comes back, looking as cool as ever, waiting for a question. Majidi says he is tired watching movies at the ongoing International Film Festival of Kerala 2018. He is jury head of competition films and there are 14 of them. He likes watching them, he likes how the festival is organised, he says. But so far he has not been able to spot the crowd that the Iffk is known for, he says.

InterviewIn an interview, Bahman Farmanara, whose new film 'Tale of the Sea' is screened at the International Film Festival of Kerala, talks about not being indifferent to what's happening in his country, the bans he's got and more.CrisBahman Farmanara’s life and work is often split into two broad categories on either side of 1979. Films made before and after the Islamic/ Iranian Revolution. But Bahman, who began making films in 1972, would tell you it’s been nearly the same, he has never been a favourite of the government like say, popular filmmaker Majid Majidi, it’s just that it was a little harder after the revolution. Something, that perhaps, made him sign up as a candidature for the office of president five years ago. His newest film – Tale of the Sea – expected to release in Iran next month (‘if there is no government intervention’), is part of the competition...

<em>Tale of the Sea (Hekayat-e Darya) </em>is Bahman Farmanara’s resonant elegy to the conclusion of an artistic era and his salute to a generation of Iranian writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers who are leaving the scene. Abbas Kiarostami, who died just over a year ago, is the name most international viewers will recognize, but many more are mentioned in this simple, atmospheric tale. It is the writer-director-producer’s most personal film since <em>Smell of Camphor, Fragance of Jasmine</em> and has the same kind of melancholy wistfulness. A starry cast including Fatemeh <span data-scayt_word="Motamed-Arya" data-scaytid="8">Motamed-Arya</span> (<em>Gilane</em>,<em> Men at Work</em>), Leila Hatami (<em>A Separation</em>) and Ali ...

Tale of the Sea (Hekayat-e Darya) is Bahman Farmanara’s resonant elegy to the conclusion of an artistic era and his salute to a generation of Iranian writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers who are leaving the scene. Abbas Kiarostami, who died just over a year ago, is the name most international viewers will recognize, but many more are mentioned in this simple, atmospheric tale. It is the writer-director-producer’s most personal film since Smell of Camphor, Fragance of Jasmine and has the same kind of melancholy wistfulness. A starry cast including Fatemeh Motamed-Arya (Gilane, Men at Work), Leila Hatami (A Separation) and...

One of the most interesting collisions of the public perception of Iran’s Islamic state and its reality is how, out of an apparently repressive state hostile to the creative arts, Abbas Kiarostami became the essential free filmmaker. “Freedom” is always a relative term when it comes to cinema, which, like politics, unfortunately runs on money. But it’s easy to spot the genuinely free filmmakers when they come along. Despite their varying struggles to get their movies made, the work that results is directly personal and unbound by prevailing cultural trends and diktats. They range from Jean Vigo to Kidlat Tahimik, Pedro Costa to Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage to Jose Luis Guerin. Kiarostami was the free filmmaker par excellence, since he managed to find his ever-developing acute approach to modernism through whatever system in which he might find himself working.

Read More: Abbas Kiarostami, Palme d’Or-Winning Director Of...

Banning the celebrated director from making films is the latest step in the regime's attempt to murder the nation's creative soul

A spectre is haunting the Islamic Republic of Iran – the spectre of freedom. All the powers of the old guard have entered a holy alliance to exorcise it: the ayatollahs and their warlords, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, hanging judges and paramilitary vigilantes.

To try to exorcise that spectre, the custodians of the sacred terror will go to any lengths. But have they gone just a bit too far this time?

What exactly does it mean to condemn a globally celebrated film-maker who has done nothing but bring credit to his profession and glory to his homeland, to six years in prison, and on top of that to ban him from making a film for 20 years, from writing any script, from attending any film festival outside his country, or giving any...