Features and documentaries made in the country are to be screened at the 5th Iranian Film Festival in Cologne, Germany on May 31- June 3.
Four feature films and nine documentaries from celebrated filmmakers and newcomers will be shown, ISNA reported on its Persian website.
“24 Frames,” by the late legendary filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), is the final movie from the acclaimed artist which shows the fusion of poetry, painting and photography in moving images.
It shows a series of 23 photos from the artist’s collection taken over 40 years and one painting by Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569), all digitally animated into subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignettes, or (as the movie calls it) a frame.
“Zemnako,” a documentary by Mehdi Qorbanpour, is about the poison gas attack on the town of Halabcha in Iran during the 1980-88 Iraqi war with Iran. It tells the story of a young man who learns about the dramatic turns and twists of his life and the horrors of the eight-year-old military conflict between the two neighbors that killed an estimated one million people on both sides.
The video installation “Museum of Peace: An Audiovisual Tour,” by the visual artist Negar Tahsili, outlines different phases of the 30 poison gas attacks that were carried out during the war, and touches on the role of German companies that supplied the chemical laboratories to Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein.
Other documentaries include Poets of Life (by Shirin Barqnavard), French Musician in the Qajar Court (by Mehran Pourmandan), Meta Marathon (by Saeed Keshavarz), Puzzleys (by Mehdi Ganji), Memories for All Seasons (by Mostafa Razzaq-Karimi), The Boulevard Story (by Davoud Ashrafi), Iran’s Arrow, the Rise & Fall of Peykan (by Shahin Armin), Mother of the Earth (by Mahnaz Afzali), and Wedding: A Film (by Mohammad Reza Farzad).
Feature films “Kupal” by Kazem Molaei, “Moft Abad” by Pejman Teymourtash and “Inversion” by Behnam Behzadi will also be screened.
The annual festival offers a platform to present Iranian cinema, highlight the role of female filmmakers and help explore Iranian history, culture and civil society.
Established in 2013, the festival has been presenting the diversity in Iranian cinema to a German audience and the Iranian community in that country.
