Afsun Moshiry and Wim Wenders teamed up to unveil six Iranian documentaries at CPH: DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Last May, after protests arose from rising food prices, three filmmakers were arrested, with law enforcement also reportedly harassing other filmmakers and taking their communications equipment. And this January, director Masoud Kimiai reportedly wasn’t allowed to depart from Iran and go to Rotterdam Film Festival. (Via Deadline)
“Iranian cinema has had always a great voice and was always transporting to a wider audience,” Moshiry said at CPH: DOX. “This is, of course, why this wants to be controlled by a regime that wants actually to be controlling everything.”
The six films unveiled were all made by Iranian directors, some in Iran and some in exile. The six films are Hollow (Mohammadreza Farzad), Density of Emptiness (Shirin Barghnavard), Shadowless – In Transit (Azin Faizabadi), Mal Tourné (Pooya Abassian), Great Are the Eyes of a Dead Father (Afsaneh Salari), and Phob (Mina Keshavarz).
“The idea of change is immanent to filmmaking, I think, and to movies,” Wenders said to Deadline. “Only utterly commercial films present a world that should stay the way it is. Only the most commercial filmmaking is not promoting the idea of change. Any independent filmmaking… as such, is promoting change. And that of course is dangerous for any regime that doesn’t really like change.”
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