Abbas Kiarostami was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–1994), Close-Up (1990), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Taste of Cherry (1997), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. In later works, Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012), he filmed for the first time outside Iran: in Italy and Japan, respectively. His films Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Close-Up, and The Wind Will Carry Us were ranked among the 100 best foreign films in a 2018 critics' poll by BBC Culture. Close-Up was also ranked one of the 50 greatest movies of all time in the famous decennial Sight & Sound poll conducted in 2012.
The cinema of Iran, or of Persia, refers to the film industry in Iran. In particular, Iranian art films have garnered international recognition. Iranian films are usually written and spoken in the Persian language.
Jafar Panâhi is an Iranian film director, screenwriter, and film editor, commonly associated with the Iranian New Wave film movement. After several years of making short films and working as an assistant director for fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi achieved international recognition with his feature film debut, The White Balloon (1995). The film won the Caméra d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, the first major award an Iranian film won at Cannes.
Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization and assimilation. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have used the term as part of a critique of 19th-century ethnography and early modern anthropology.
Direct cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962 in North America—principally in the Canadian province of Quebec and in the United States—and was developed in France by Jean Rouch. It is a cinematic practice employing lightweight portable filming equipment, hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound that became available because of new, ground-breaking technologies developed in the early 1960s. These innovations made it possible for independent filmmakers to do away with a truckload of optical sound-recording, large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment and special lights, expensive necessities that severely hog-tied these low-budget documentarians. Like the cinéma vérité genre, direct cinema was initially characterized by filmmakers' desire to capture reality directly, to represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship between reality and cinema.
Peyman Yazdanian is an Iranian pianist and music composer. He has written over forty pieces for solo piano and has composed for both national and foreign feature films. He wrote original soundtracks for plays and multimedia.
The Midnight Sun Film Festival is an annual five-day film festival in Sodankylä, Finland. The festival usually takes place in the second week of June. One of the main characteristics of the festival is to show films without a break around the clock while the sun shines around the clock.
Come Back, Africa is a 1959 film, the second feature-length film written, produced, and directed by American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. The film had a profound effect on African cinema, and remains historically and cultural importance as a document preserving the heritage of the townships in South Africa in the 1950s. It may be classified as reportage, documentary, historical movie or political cinema, since it portrays real events and people. It reveals an interpretation of meaningful social facts and a strong ethical assumption towards human behaviours like racism.
Iranian New Wave refers to a movement in Iranian cinema. It started in 1964 with Hajir Darioush's second film Serpent's Skin, which was based on D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover featuring Fakhri Khorvash and Jamshid Mashayekhi. Darioush's two important early social documentaries But Problems Arose in 1965, dealing with the cultural alienation of the Iranian youth, and Face 75, a critical look at the westernization of the rural culture, which was a prizewinner at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival, also contributed significantly to the establishment of the New Wave. In 1968, after the release of Shohare Ahoo Khanoom directed by Davoud Mollapour, The Cow directed by Dariush Mehrjui followed by Masoud Kimiai's Qeysar in 1969, Nasser Taqvai's Tranquility in the Presence of Others, and immediately followed by Bahram Beyzai's Downpour, the New Wave became well established as a prominent cultural, dynamic and intellectual trend. The Iranian viewer became discriminating, encouraging the new trend to prosper and develop.
Docufiction is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or fictional situations in narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality using some kind of artistic expression.
Ethnofiction refers to a subfield of ethnography which produces works that introduce art, in the form of storytelling, "thick descriptions and conversational narratives", and even first-person autobiographical accounts, into peer-reviewed academic works.
The 57th annual Venice International Film Festival was held between 30 August to 9 September 2000.
António Campos was one of the pioneer filmmakers of visual anthropology in Portugal. Mainly using pure documentary techniques, he shot ethnographic films and tried docufiction. As well as in fictional films, he used the methods of direct cinema to portrait the life of ancient human communities (ethnofiction) of his country.
Certified Copy is a 2010 art film written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Set in Tuscany, the film focuses on a British writer and a French antiques dealer, whose relationship undergoes an odd transformation over the course of a day. The film was a French-majority production, with co-producers in Italy and Belgium. The dialogue is in English, French and Italian.
Esmael Barari ;, is an Iranian filmmaker, film director, screenwriter, film editor and film producer. He is director of World Iranian Film Center, a member of The Union of Iranian Cinema Producers and a member of international jury of Mostra Valencia Film Festival.
Taxi, also known as Taxi Tehran, is a 2015 Iranian docufiction starring and directed by Jafar Panahi. The film premiered in competition at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize. In 2010, Panahi was banned from making films and travelling for 20 years, so his niece Hana Saeidi, who also appears in the film, collected the award on his behalf.
The 21st Busan International Film Festival was held from October 6 to October 15, 2016 at the Busan Cinema Center and was hosted by Sol Kyung-gu and Han Hyo-joo. A total of 301 films from 69 countries were screened at the festival, including 96 world premieres and 27 international premieres.
