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Seti (Sarvin Zabetiyan), a young music prodigy, has one big dream – to make her voice heard. But she lives in a country that bans women from singing publicly. For her, giving up is not an option, so she goes on a personal quest to bend the rules. Unfortunately, each time she gets the opportunity to perform, something or someone gets in her way. Even on such rare occasions when she is offered to do something legally, like performing backing vocals on a song sung by a male vocalist, she has to keep her voice down because – as she gots to hear from her mentor: “A voice can not be identified as a woman’s, and men sing louder anyway.”

We meet Seti already in the opening minute of Soheil Beiraghi’s drama “Bidad” that world-premiered in the Crystal Globe Competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize.

Whereas Hollywood has told and retold “A Star Is Born” so many times as to make trite its plot — of a preternaturally gifted young female singer whose career is simultaneously encouraged and complicated by an alcoholic has-been — Iranian director Soheil Beiraghi’s bold, risky and occasionally clunky “Bidad” depicts how radically different that trajectory might be in the filmmaker’s home country. In “Bidad,” a star is born and very nearly smothered in the cradle by the Islamic system, which all but forbids women from singing. But Beiraghi’s film, like its magnetic 20-something protagonist Seti (Sarvin Zabetian), remains defiant, insisting that female voices be heard in a society determined to silence them.

More overtly critical of the oppressive regime than most Iranian cinema, but also more traditional in its storytelling than recent films from Panahi and Rasoulof, “Bidad” presents itself as a straightforward aspirational artist story (with a surprisingly...

Days before his drama Bidad enters the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on 9 July, Iranian filmmaker Soheil Beiraghi disclosed that several members of his production team have been sentenced in Tehran for their work on the film, receiving jail terms later converted to fines and suspended sentences.

Court documents list charges such as “encouraging corruption,” “producing obscene content,” and “propaganda against the state.” Beiraghi himself was fined the equivalent of 165 million tomans after a three-year-seven-month custodial term was commuted; lead actress Sarvin Zabetian received a 91-day term, suspended for five years, and is banned from using a smartphone in that period.

Shot in secret and without government permits, Bidad follows Seti, a young woman who sings in public despite Iran’s four-decade ban on female solo performance, transforming city streets into a stage for spontaneous audiences. Festival organizers say they delayed announcing the film until...

Outcry. That is the English-language title of Soheil Beiraghi’s fourth feature, Bidad, which has been making waves even before world premiering at the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) on Wednesday.

Festival programmers held back on unveiling the 12th movie in the Crystal Globe Competition until the last minute to allow the filmmaker to travel to the Czech fest. After all, the movie about a Gen Z girl in Tehran who wants her voice to be heard and decides to sing in the streets, even though women are not allowed to perform in public, would not be allowed by the censors in his home country.

Bidad stars Sarvin Zabetian (180 Degree Rule, Terrestrial Verses), Leili Rashidi and Amir Jadidi. Beiraghi (I, Cold Sweat, Popular) wrote, directed, produced and co-edited the movie, and he handled art direction. His Alef Pictures is the production company and is also handling sales.

Seti loves music and singing, and she yearns for her voice to be heard. Great, you say? No problem, you say? Well, not so fast! What you need to know is that Seti lives in Iran, where it is against the law for women to perform in public.

That is why Soheil Beiraghi’s fourth feature, Bidad, meaning Outcry, world premiering as the long-secret 12th movie in the Crystal Globe Competition of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) on July 9, would not be allowed by the censors in his home country.

Seti is its protagonist, and she won’t be silenced without standing up for herself. “In the heart of Tehran, Seti, a girl from Generation Z, dreams of sharing her voice with the world. But in a society where women

are not allowed to sing in public, her dream feels impossibly distant,” reads a plot summary for the film.

Iranian artist and filmmaker Shahab Fotouhi’s “Boomerang” has debuted an exclusive clip (below) following the film’s world premiere in Venice Days, an independent sidebar to the Venice Film Festival.

In his tender drama, set in Tehran, old relationships break – like Sima’s marriage to Behzad – and new ones begin. Sometimes, by complete chance.

As Sima starts looking for a new home for herself and her daughter Minoo, her soon-to-be ex meets up with his former flame. He’s also looking for a rare species of owl, living somewhere outside the city. But teenage Minoo is busy as well: she meets a boy.

“Minoo and Keyvan first make eye contact at a traffic light and quickly form a bond without exchanging a word. As they walk through the city and flirt, ‘Boomerang’ captures a sense of lightness and fluidity reminiscent of the French New Wave,” said the director.

“Behzad...

Shahab Fotouhi’s debut feature “Boomerang” is a delightful, surprising portrait of modern Iran, but its biggest surprise is that Fotouhi is in his forties. His voice is the kind that feels not only fresh, but under-heard. He paints metropolitan Tehran with youthful verve, capturing — through loosely connected stories, a few non-sequiturs and even a scene of magical realism — the city’s vibes during a moment of generational transition.

Of course, that Fotouhi was raised immediately following the Iranian revolution still makes sense. Several of the film’s characters are middle-aged, and some of them — the men in particular — struggle to let go of old modes of thinking, interacting and being. However, the crux of “Boomerang” is its female characters: a mother, Sima (Leili Rashidi), and her teenage daughter Minoo (Yas Farkhondeh), who seldom interact on screen, but whose overlapping stories speak to the country’s shifting tides.

The film begins in rom-com mode,...

Shadi Karamroudi (b. 1990) is an Iranian actress, director and screenwriter. She learned the basics of filmmaking and acting at Karnameh Film School in Tehran and graduated with a master's degree in Dramatic Literature from Soore University, Tehran in 2020. “It turns Blue” is her third short film as a director which is written, directed and produces by herself.

“It Turns Blue” is screening at Busan International Short Film Festival

The movie begins inside an apartment where Morteza is painting a wall blue while playing with his daughter, 3-year old Raha, asking her to put her palms in the paint and touching the wall. A bit later, however, the girl takes his phone and throws it in the paint, which results in him getting violent with her, although this part is implied and not actually shown. Not knowing what to do, and since her mother is to pick her up soon, he...

The Canadian Screen Awards has unveiled nominations for the national film and TV prize-giving, and the CBC civil rights drama The Porter leads the film and TV field with 19 mentions in all, including for best small-screen drama.

The first Canadian drama series from an all-Black creative team, which also streams on BET+, centers on the lives of Black train porters and their families as they launch North America’s first Black labor union in the 1920s.

The TV categories, voted on by around 3,000 Canadian industry insiders, also sees the CBC series Detention Adventure and Sort Of – a Peabody award-winning show about a gender fluid young Muslim in Toronto played by Bilal Baig — nab 15 nominations each in an awards show shaping up to be a major showcase for people of color.

That follows Canadian film, and TV industry efforts to ensure diversity and inclusivity in the country’s indie production sector and prize-giving process.

Rarely in cinema, and especially in Iranian cinema, we get a glimpse into the lives of upper classes, especially upper-middle class, commonly known as bourgeoisie. The oddity is even higher if the plot of the story is not set in the capital Teheran. “Summer with Hope”, a sophomore feature by Sadaf Foroughi, following her 2017 acclaimed debut “Ava”, is one of such oddities. The film won the Crystal Globe main competition of Karlovy Vary and it seems like it will be going places, establishing Montreal-based Foroughi as one of the most interesting voices in the contemporary Iranian cinema.

Our hero Omid whose name translates to “hope” from Farsi is a big swimming prodigy, which was the reason for his family, mother Leili and uncle Saadi (Alireza Kamali) to move from Teheran to an elite residential area in Gilan province on the bank of the Caspian Sea. While Leili waits to finalize...

Summer of Hope team: (from left) director Sadaf Foroughi, Saman Majd (film crew), Kiarash Anvari (producer) and actress Leili Rashidi Photo: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

The 56th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival roared back to full throttle after an interrupted two years with an awards ceremony which saw star turns Benicio Del Toro and Geoffrey Rush receive special lifetime achievement Crystal Globes while the event’s top prize was bestowed on Summer Of Hope, directed and written by Iranian-Canadian Sadaf Foroughi and set in Iran.

The film deals with a competitive swimmer as he struggles to train for an ocean-going competition.

Scene from Karlovy Vary top prizewinner Summer Of Love Photo: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Other awards which spread the prizes glory around Europe and elsewhere, included a Spanish study of interactions between friends in Madrid and directed by Jonás Trueba which received the special jury prize.

Local...

At a late point in “Summer With Hope,” as the film’s various walls of conflict are closing menacingly in on each other, and the camera has seemingly surrendered to a state of permanent penumbra, our protagonist’s agonized mother utters a line that could be the synopsis for a million thrillers and melodramas that have gone before. “We came here for a simple reason,” she sighs, “and it got complicated.” From the audience’s point of view, however, nothing in Sadaf Foroughi’s elegant, escalatingly tragic second feature is as simple as it seems to the characters. The film often leaves us literally in the dark, piecing together key events and circumstances in an ostensibly straightforward story — about a teenage swimmer and his elders, invested in the outcome of crucial national qualifiers — that is folded and fractured by the politics and tacit social codes of modern Iran.

As such,...

Pig (Khook) Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net by: Harvey Karten Director: Mani Haghighi Screenwriter: Mani Haghighi Cast: Hasan Majuni, Leila Hatami, Leili Rashidi, Parinaz Izadyar, Mina Jafarzadeh Screened at: Critics’ Link, NYC, 1/6/19 Opens: January 11, 2019 at Iranian Film Festival in NY: at IFC Center, 323 6th Avenue How do you like your Iranian […]

The post Pig Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

An angry woman rails against the system in the punchy and timely “Cold Sweat,” a fact-based drama about an Iranian national futsal team member whose husband uses his legal right to prevent her traveling abroad and playing in the most important game of her life. This intelligently written, well performed and emotionally rewarding second feature by writer-director Soheil Beiraghi (“Me”) will enlighten and entertain audiences everywhere. A hit in local cinemas when released in late September, “Cold Sweat” ought to enjoy a long festival life at the very least. French arthouse outfit Sophie Dulac Distribution will screen the film theatrically Nov. 28.

A tale with especially strong appeal in these #TimesUp times, “Cold Sweat” draws from the real-life cases of many Iranian sportswomen whose dreams were dashed when their husbands invoked patriarchal laws. Its success at the local box office comes in the wake of well-publicized protests at the men’s soccer World Cup in June,...

Low-stakes rebellion comes easily to Ava, a headstrong teenager who approaches her parents with the kind of eye-rolling moodiness that most high schoolers have down pat. It seems like the kind of thing she’ll outgrow. In the meantime, she’s still a pretty good kid, a bright and vibrant student with a close circle of friends who excels at music and hopes to turn her talent with the violin into a lifelong pursuit. She has the kind of internal life her parents can’t fathom, but there’s nothing strange about that — she is a 17-year-old girl, after all — but as the expectations of her young life in a constricted Tehran become more and more difficult to navigate, Ava’s rebellion morphs into something else.

The film is loosely based on filmmaker Sadar Foroughi’s own coming-of-age in Tehran and won the Fipresci Discovery Award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival,...

Ava Grasshopper Film Reviewed by: Harvey Karten Director: Sadaf Foroughi Screenwriter: Sadaf Foroughi Cast: Mahour Jabbari, Bahar Nouhian, Leili Rashidi, Vahid Aghapour, Shayeste Sajadi, Sarah Alimardani, Houman Hoursan Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 4/20/18 Opens: April 27, 2018 Watching this mother-from-hell berate her daughter reminds me of verses by the British poet and Oxford University […]

The post Ava Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Sadaf Foroughi’s fulminating debut feature, Ava, may strike a few chords among Persepolis enthusiasts. A role-model schoolgirl turned rebel, its eponymous teenage girl is a rollicking blend between Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s black-and-white punk teen and The 400 Blows‘ Antoine Doinel – a heroine fighting to reassert her freedom in the face of an ultra-conservative environment. Tehran-born, Montreal-based writer-director Foroughi draws from her childhood memories to conjure up a gripping coming-of-age story where the claustrophobic relationship between an overprotective mother and her teenage daughter acts as a synecdoche to expose a patriarchal society eager to chastise whatever falls outside its rigidly policed norms.

Premiered at Tiff in September 2017, where it nabbed the Discovery Award, Ava follows its titular 17-year-old (Mahour Jabbari), an impeccable student and promising violinist from an upper-middle-class Tehran family, whose life starts crumbling after her mistrustful mother (Bahar Nouhian) subjects her to a revoltingly humiliating...

Christian Petzold, Emily Atef, Lance Daly join Berlinale.

Source: Great Point Media

‘Damsel’

Another ten films have joined the Competition of the 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 15 - 25). Three more have also been selected for the programme of the Berlinale Special.

Joining the eight Competition films and two Berlinale Special titles are 13 productions from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong - China, Iran, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Paraguay, People’s Republic of China, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and the USA.

Joining the main competition are Barbara and Phoenix director Christian Petzold’s new drama Transit, a contemporary reworking of Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel about refugees attempting to flee through Marseille after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. The film stars Frantz breakout Paula Beer.

Also new to competition is David and Nathan Zellner’s Damsel, the western about a Us businessman who travels to join his fiancée...

Christian Petzold, Emily Atef, Lance Daly join Berlinale.

Source: Great Point Media

‘Damsel’

Another ten films have joined the Competition of the 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. Three more have also been selected for the programme of the Berlinale Special.

Joining the eight Competition films and two Berlinale Special titles are 13 productions from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong - China, Iran, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Paraguay, People’s Republic of China, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and the USA.

Additional films for both categories are due to be revealed soon. Films announced today are:

Competition

3 Tage in Quiberon (3 Days in Quiberon)

Germany / Austria / France

By Emily Atef (Molly’s Way, The Stranger In Me)

With Marie Bäumer, Birgit Minichmayr, Charly Hübner, Robert Gwisdek, Denis Lavant

World premiere

Black 47

Ireland / Luxembourg

By Lance Daly (Kisses, The Good Doctor)

With Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville, Stephen Rea, [link...