During the few days I was in Yerevan covering the Golden Apricot International Film Festival, my conversation with Amir slowly took shape. Some of it happened while we were walking around the city. Some came from shorter conversations between screenings and festival events. Eventually, we sat down for several hours and talked properly about the film.

Inside Amir won the Golden Apricot in the Regional Competition. The film had its world premiere in 2025 at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, where it screened in the independent Giornate degli Autori section and received the 2025 GdA Director’s Award.

In this conversation, Amir talks about where Inside Amir first came from, Tehran, migration, love, the bicycle, and making the film without an official permit. He also explains why he wanted to show a part of everyday urban life in Iran without censoring himself, and shares a few stories about the film for the first time.

Spoiler warning: This interview includes details about the story and the film’s ending.

Where did the first idea for Inside Amir come from? Had it been in your mind for a long time, or was there one moment that really started it?

Amir: The first idea came from something a lot of us in Tehran live with. Because of everything going on in the country, the idea of leaving enters your life quite early. After 2009, I started hearing more and more people talking about leaving.

It was already part of my own family too. My brother had wanted to move to the US since he was a teenager, and eventually he did. But the thing that really gave me the idea for the film was my sister Elnaz leaving.

Elnaz was born in 1991. She’s the youngest in our family, and she lives in the US now.

Once everything was arranged and she knew she was definitely going, I noticed that the closer she got to the flight, the more emotional she became. It was like she was suddenly seeing things she hadn’t paid much attention to before, because they had always been there.

A few days before she left, she said, “Amir, can we spend these last three or four days together? Can you take me to see my friends?”

I said, “Yeah, Elnaz. Let’s go.”

So I took her to see them. I could see she was holding back tears all the time. There was a goodbye happening inside her. A quiet, gentle kind of goodbye.

That stayed in my mind.

There’s something strange about leaving. When you’re about to lose something you’ve lived with and touched for years, suddenly you see its beauty much more clearly.

You think about people. The streets you walked together. The parks, the trips, the memories. You start thinking, what do I do with my brother? What do I do with my friends? What do I do with all these things that have been part of my life?

That idea stayed with me and slowly became Inside Amir.

Later, when I travelled with the film to different festivals, I realised that this feeling isn’t only ours. People in many places are thinking about leaving. Maybe they’ll find another life somewhere else. Maybe they’ll start again.

When you’re living somewhere, you see the good things and the bad things together. But when you’re close to leaving, somehow the good things come forward. You notice them more.

Your relationship with the city changes.

After making the film, I felt that even though Inside Amir comes directly from my own experience and from Tehran, the story could still connect with people in very different places.

Instead of showing migration mainly through pressure, crisis and hardship, the film looks more at the attachments and the beauty people notice when they are about to leave. Did you know from the beginning that you wanted to approach it this way?

Amir: Yes. I kept thinking about why so many stories about Iran go towards the darker parts of life. And of course, we do live in a difficult place. There are political problems, economic pressure and many other things. You can’t deny any of that.

But I didn’t want to go there again.

I’ve never really said this before, but I deliberately wanted to get away from some of the clichés I’d seen a lot in Iranian cinema. I wanted to talk about migration, but I didn’t want to make something that felt like films we’d already seen.

I could have made it much more bitter. I could have pushed the pain further. I could have tried harder to make people emotional. But that wasn’t what I wanted.

I wanted to look at that moment just before someone leaves, when things that have been around them for years suddenly become visible again.

Later, from the reactions I got and some of the things people wrote about the film, I felt that maybe Inside Amir had managed to do that in its own way.

The main character is called Amir. How much of Amir Azizi is in him?

Amir: The actor’s real name is Amirhossein Hosseini, and most people call him Amir. The funny thing is that the film wasn’t even called Inside Amir at first.

I had a screenplay that I wanted to shoot by the sea, on the coastal road from Bushehr towards Bandar Abbas. The original title was Waves.

Then I decided to bring the story to Tehran. While I was rewriting it, I kept thinking that what I really cared about was the inside of this person. I saw Amirhossein, saw that he could ride a bicycle, and I thought, yes, this is him. Slowly, the title became Inside Amir.

And inside, Amir is very close to me.

You’ve travelled with me. You know what I’m like. I’m loud. I joke around, I laugh, I’m always moving, I have a lot of energy. Someone might think I’m the same inside. I’m not.

A lot of the time I go into myself. I think about things. Why did this happen? Why is my friend depressed? Why did someone have an accident and now doesn’t have the money to deal with it? Why did this happen to this person?

These questions take me inside myself.

Amir does that too. There are many moments when he goes quiet and goes into himself. So yes, his inner world is very close to mine.

What you see outside isn’t always what a person is like inside. In Persian we talk about someone’s face and someone’s inner character as two different things. I wanted Amir to have that sensitivity inside him. Someone who notices beauty.

Tara is connected to Amir’s past, but also to the future he may have somewhere else. What role does she play in his decision to leave?

Amir: When I was building the character, I kept asking myself: with all the attachment Amir has to Tehran, his friends and his memories, what could actually make him leave?

I didn’t want his story to be exactly like my sister Elnaz’s story. Elnaz wanted to leave and start another life, work, build something for herself and follow her goals.

For Amir, I needed something else.

And the only thing I could think of that might pull someone away from all those attachments was love.

The person he loves is somewhere else. He misses her. He’s attached to her. I couldn’t think of anything else strong enough to take Amir away from Tehran, with all the memories and all the things he has there.

So Tara, and Amir’s love for her, became one of the main reasons he might leave.

Amir and Tara’s relationship begins in a very simple, everyday way. Why did you want it to be like that?

Amir: This was one of the main lines in the screenplay.

I always write a complete screenplay and work on it very carefully. Inside Amir was made very close to what was written. Even the dialogue changed very little.

For Amir and Tara, I wanted a very simple and honest kind of love.

Tara hasn’t known Amir for long. She saw him about a week earlier, riding his bicycle freely through the city, and she liked him. Then she’s the one who goes to him and suggests that they talk and see each other.

I didn’t want their relationship to feel calculated. Love isn’t always two plus two equals four.

At first, some people in the crew told me maybe the scene wouldn’t work. Maybe it would feel artificial. Maybe people wouldn’t believe it.

But after the screenings, it became one of the scenes people talked to me about the most.

I think it worked because it was simple. It wasn’t trying too hard.

As the film goes on, Amir seems to become even more attached to Tehran. By the end, you almost want him to stay. But do you actually know if he leaves?

Amir: No. I really don’t know.

After the screening in Yerevan, they asked me the same thing. Does Amir leave or not? I said, I don’t know.

I’m not saying that to make the film mysterious. I’m not trying to sell the ending. I genuinely don’t know.

I feel his love for Tara is honest and he really misses her. He wants to see her. Maybe he goes. Maybe six months later he comes back. Maybe something completely different happens.

For me, the important thing wasn’t the answer. It was the goodbye.

As you get closer to the end, you start seeing everything Amir may be leaving. The people, the streets, his friends, all these ordinary things that don’t seem so important when they’re just part of your everyday life.

But those are the things that stay with you.

It’s like those few days you and I had in Yerevan. Nothing huge happened. We walked, talked, laughed, sat around. But later those things become memories.

That’s Inside Amir for me too.

By the end, maybe you’re sitting there thinking: I hope he doesn’t go.

I showed more of the beauty in those everyday things. I know I moved away from some of the darkness we’re used to seeing. Maybe I’m just tired of all the darkness I’ve seen in films and experienced over the years.

But the film is still sad. Saying goodbye is sad. Looking at a city you love and thinking maybe this is the last time you’ll see some of these things, that’s painful enough.

It’s just a different kind of sadness.

The bicycle is one of the main elements in the film. Amir is always moving, but his life somehow feels stuck. Was that contrast there from the beginning?

Amir: The bicycle was very important to me.

A bicycle already means movement in a way. Passing through, moving forward, freedom. For Amir it’s more than something he uses to get around. It’s almost another character.

Everything around him can feel fixed. Tired. Stuck. But the bicycle keeps saying: move, keep going, don’t stop.

When Amir rides, his mood changes. He breathes differently. It’s like he can see some kind of light ahead.

That’s also why he doesn’t sell the bicycle at the end.

He gets rid of many things, but he keeps the bicycle and leaves it with his closest friends, Nader and Nariman.

It’s like he’s leaving one of his deepest attachments behind in Tehran.

And maybe that makes us think he could come back.

Tehran isn’t just a background in the film. It feels like one of the characters. What Tehran were you trying to show?

Amir: Yes. Tehran, before the war and everything that happened recently, is one of the main characters in the film.

I should mention something here. The film was finished before the 12-day war, and during the first days of the war we had a really difficult time even uploading it for the Venice festival. After that, everything in Tehran and Iran changed into something much more frightening.

The Tehran we live in now is not exactly the Tehran you see in Inside Amir. For me, a lot of the beauty you see in the film belongs to the city before the war. Tehran’s spirit has been badly hurt since then. You can feel it in people, in the streets, in the city itself.

Sometimes I feel that something somehow pushed us, me and the Inside Amir team, to record that Tehran before it changed.

Tehran has been through a very strange history and many difficult periods, but it has always carried its own beauty too.

When I was writing the screenplay, I kept asking myself how I could show the city as honestly as possible.

Tehran has these streets, these alleys, these trees, and these people living in it.

I never wanted to say that all of Tehran is what you see in Inside Amir. Of course it has other sides, other problems, other realities. But this is Tehran too. It’s the Tehran I know and the Tehran I’ve experienced.

After some screenings, people would come up to me and ask, “Is Tehran really like this?”

I’d say, yes, of course it is.

Some people asked about the women walking in the streets without hijab. For me, that was simply part of what I was seeing in the city.

Tehran has changed a lot over the past few years. If this is what exists in my real life, why should I show it differently in the film?

So I kept telling myself: don’t lie in a single frame.

The Tehran you see in Inside Amir is Tehran from my point of view. It’s not the whole city. It’s the part I know, the part these characters live in. And when you see them moving through the streets and alleys, a lot of what you’re seeing is simply the city as it was. Those images were recorded almost like documentary observations of real life.

When people outside Iran were surprised by the Tehran they saw in the film, what did that tell you about the Iran they had seen before?

Amir: Something happened in Tokyo that I found very interesting.

A Japanese woman came to me wearing a traditional kimono. She didn’t speak English, so Shohreh Golparian was translating between us.

She said she follows Iranian cinema and loves it. Then she said, “I just wanted to tell you how beautiful you young Iranians are. How stylish you are. How beautiful everything is.”

I was really surprised.

She said she had never seen this side of life in Iran shown like this before.

Then she asked about Amir’s house. Whose house was it? I said, it’s my own house in Tehran.

I hadn’t thought, while making the film, that someone in Japan might be surprised by the house, by the people, by normal everyday life.

Something similar happened at Golden Apricot.

An Iranian woman who has lived in Yerevan for many years came to me after the screening and said, “Thank you. Thank you for showing us like this.”

That meant a lot to me.

I have respect for the other films made about Iran. But from these screenings I realised that a lot of people outside Iran simply hadn’t seen this Tehran before.

Tehran has beautiful alleys. Modern people live there. Different kinds of lives are happening at the same time. Things that are completely normal to us were new to some of these audiences.

I wasn’t trying to say Iran is only this. Or Tehran is only this.

I just wanted to show the thing I know, the way I see it.

The dialogue and details feel very controlled, but many of the situations also feel like they come from real life. How much was written in advance, and how much came from people around you?

Amir: Inside Amir was made almost completely from the screenplay. The actors were saying the dialogue that was written.

But a lot of the characters and situations were inspired by people around me, my friends and my family. Then I took those things and turned them into the screenplay.

A lot of things in the film have roots in real conversations or things that happened around me. For example, Pirouz says at one point that he wants to go to the south and collect rubbish on the beaches. Things like that came from real conversations.

I worked on the screenplay for about ten or eleven months.

For me, a big part of making the film happens before shooting.

I worked for years as an assistant director and script supervisor, so I think about a lot of these details before I get to the set. Continuity, timing, how the scene moves. I work those things out early.

Then I mix that structure with what I’ve taken from family, friends and people around me.

I edited the film myself too. For me, all these stages are connected.

I think when you’re an independent filmmaker, you have to look around you. There are characters everywhere. Stories everywhere. We pass them every day and sometimes don’t even notice.

Especially now, in these difficult days in Tehran and Iran, these stories are right in front of us.

It would be a shame to just walk past them.

Inside Amir was made within independent Iranian cinema. What did that independence change for you as a filmmaker?

Amir: I think art shows itself better when it’s independent, not when someone is ordering you to make a certain kind of work. Cinema feels more beautiful to me in that independent space.

But staying independent is hard.

There’s so much pressure, confusion and dishonesty around us. Trying to keep going as an independent artist in that kind of situation is very difficult. But I feel you can make work you can stand behind more easily that way.

I think art needs to be free.

And in a place where you have political pressure and other restrictions, staying independent can be one of the hardest things an artist does.

I love cinema for cinema itself. Images, mise-en-scène, composition, sound, acting. I love all of it. Cinema switches something on inside me.

But I also want to make films as honestly as I can.

If several women live together in a house, I don’t want to show them in a way that isn’t real just because the official rules tell me I have to.

For me, independence means I get to make that decision.

Another filmmaker may make a different decision. That’s their choice. I don’t want to judge them. I just know how I want to work.

I don’t want someone telling me before I make a film which parts of life I’m allowed to show and which parts I’m supposed to hide.

How difficult was it to make the film independently with a small crew and limited resources? And after all that, what did the festival success mean to you?

Amir: It was very hard.

The version I first sent to Venice was about two hours and seven minutes long, and it still needed more editing and cleaning up. During the production, I was also doing a big part of the work myself.

Sometimes it was something very basic, like taking care of food for the crew. Sometimes it meant going to the airport at five-thirty in the morning because we needed a shot.

I followed all of it closely because I believed in the film. There were days when I barely slept.

When you’ve spent that long under pressure, your mind doesn’t suddenly change just because the film gets into a festival or wins an award.

I still doubt my films. I still question the films themselves and the whole process of making them.

But when I’m writing, shooting or editing, it’s different. Then I know exactly what I’m looking for. I know what I’ve written, and I know how I want to make it.

Maybe I’m at my best when I’m making a film or writing a screenplay.

I would like to thank Amir Azizi for taking the time to speak with Souzian Dispatch in Yerevan, and for sharing the personal stories and experiences behind Inside Amir.

Inside Amir screened twice in the Regional Competition at the 23rd Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival: on Friday, July 17 at 10:00 AM and Saturday, July 18 at 7:00 PM, both at the House of Cinema, H. Malyan Hall.

The film went on to receive the Golden Apricot in the Regional Competition.

More About the Film

Inside Amir follows a young man preparing to leave Tehran and join Tara, the woman he loves, abroad. As his departure gets closer, his relationship with the city, his friends and the small routines of everyday life begins to change.

The film had its world premiere at Giornate degli Autori during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in 2025, where Amir Azizi received the GdA Director’s Award.

• Golden Apricot film page

• Giornate degli Autori film page

• Amir Azizi on Instagram

Palestine and Iran account for much of this year’s regional presence. The programme also includes films set in Lebanon, Türkiye, Iraq and Morocco, alongside stories following migration routes through Yemen, Libya and the Mediterranean.

Palestine

Conversation With The Sea

• Director: Muayad Alayan

• Countries: Palestine, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Qatar

• Section: Centrepiece

• Premiere: North American Premiere

• Running time: 112 min

“In Jerusalem, Kamal, a 60-year-old Palestinian man, is ordered by an Israeli court to pay a large social security debt.”

The debt belongs to Kamal’s son Wael, who was believed to have drowned in the Red Sea decades earlier. With no official death record, Kamal begins looking again for what happened to him. Muayad Alayan wrote the film with Rami Alayan. Conversation With The Sea will have its world premiere in Venezia Spotlight before travelling to Toronto, while MAD World is handling international sales.

Thirteen in Gaza

• Director: Hosam Abu Dan

• Country: Palestine

• Section: Centrepiece

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 77 min

“A father and his teenage daughter navigating everyday life in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.”

The film marks the narrative feature debut of Palestinian filmmaker and editor Hosam Abu Dan. Rather than giving the Gaza story a broad political frame, the available description keeps its attention on the everyday relationship between the father and daughter.

Edward Said: Between Worlds

• Director: Maiken Baird

• Country: United States

• Section: TIFF Docs

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 107 min

“The life and legacy of Palestinian scholar Edward Said through archival footage and his own words.”

Maiken Baird was given access to the Said family and estate archives for the documentary, which follows Edward Said from his childhood in Jerusalem through exile, academic life, music, writing and his engagement with Palestine.

A Tenderness

• Director: Sabrine Khoury

• Countries: Netherlands, Palestine

• Section: Short Cuts

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 17 min

“During her parents’ visit, a new Palestinian mother living in Amsterdam struggles to connect with her newborn.”

Written and directed by Sabrine Khoury, the Palestinian Arabic-language short takes place during a family visit, where the difficulties of early motherhood meet the expectations and care of the new mother’s parents.

The Black Box is Orange

• Director: Yuula Benivolski

• Country: Canada

• Section: Wavelengths

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 90 min

“A multimodal, autobiographical essay film that deploys both personal memory and incomplete archives.”

Yuula Benivolski uses that personal archive to return to al-Bassa, a Palestinian village near the Lebanese border connected to her family history and the displacement of 1948. The film is Yuula Benivolski’s feature debut and will premiere in Wavelengths.

Iran

Iran has one of the widest spreads across the TIFF programme this year, with films in Discovery, TIFF Docs, Centrepiece, Short Cuts and Wavelengths.

Head to Head

• Director: Ghasideh Golmakani

• Countries: Iran, Germany

• Section: Discovery

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 80 min

“A female director forces male actors to wear skirts and headscarves.”

The reversal sits at the centre of Ghasideh Golmakani’s first feature, an absurd political satire set in contemporary Iran. Head to Head will have its world premiere in Discovery.

Tehran, Under the Skin

• Director: Afsaneh Salari

• Countries: France, Iran, Sweden

• Section: TIFF Docs

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 84 min

“Afsaneh Salari embeds herself in the offices of Iranian plastic surgeons to interview their clients with humour and empathy.”

The documentary stays close to patients and doctors inside Tehran’s cosmetic surgery clinics. For Afsaneh Salari, those conversations offer a way into the expectations and anxieties surrounding appearance and the body in contemporary Tehran.

Rehearsals for a Revolution

• Director: Pegah Ahangarani

• Countries: Czech Republic, Spain

• Section: Centrepiece

• Premiere: Canadian Premiere

• Running time: 98 min

“Through five portraits of relatives and mentors, five expressions of resistance, Pegah Ahangarani sketches her life story.”

Pegah Ahangarani combines personal archives, home videos, street footage, newspapers and recorded voices to move through more than four decades of Iranian history. The film premiered at Cannes earlier this year and received the L’Oeil d’Or for documentary.

Ghazal-e Sorkh

• Director: Maryam Tafakory

• Countries: Iran, United Kingdom, France

• Section: Wavelengths

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 20 min

“An essay film that recounts the 1976 boycott of the Shiraz Art Festival.”

Maryam Tafakory brings the history of the Shiraz Arts Festival into a 20-minute essay film connecting personal, national and international histories. Ghazal-e Sorkh will screen in Wavelengths 2: This Suffocating Now.

Peacocks Come with the Clouds

• Director: Parastoo Anoushahpour

• Countries: Iran, Canada

• Section: Wavelengths

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 48 min

“Shot over a decade in multiple Kurdish-majority villages on the border of Iran and Turkmenistan.”

Parastoo Anoushahpour works with a collection of wedding embroideries through workshops with local children. The film connects the objects with the villages and people around them, and will have its world premiere in Wavelengths.

A Sweet Day

• Director: Omid Abdollahi

• Country: Iran

• Section: Short Cuts

• Premiere: North American Premiere

• Running time: 18 min

“A young woman gets the chance to have a conjugal meeting with her imprisoned husband after a long time.”

Omid Abdollahi sets the encounter inside the severe environment of a prison, where the woman tries to recover something of the romantic relationship she once shared with her husband. Behdokht Valian leads the 18-minute Persian-language film.

Ba’s Book

• Director: Ashley Duong

• Country: Canada

• Section: TIFF Docs

• Premiere: World Premiere

“A father writes a memoir ... about his harrowing experiences of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution.”

Ba’s Book is primarily a Vietnamese Canadian family documentary, but the Iranian Revolution forms a direct part of the history Ashley Duong is working through. Ashley Duong responds to her father’s memoir by filming participatory recreations with members of her family.

Lebanon

Furies

• Director: Rami Kodeih

• Countries: Lebanon, Brazil

• Section: Centrepiece

• Premiere: North American Premiere

• Running time: 134 min

“The banks freeze millions of depositors out of their own life savings.”

Rami Kodeih turns Lebanon’s banking crisis into a heist story. Sisters Maro and Dalia decide to recover their own money from the bank when they need it for urgent medical treatment. Rami Kodeih co-wrote the film with Nora Mariana Salim, and Furies will premiere in Venezia Spotlight before Toronto.

Türkiye

Trees Are Watching

• Director: Bahman Ghobadi

• Country: Türkiye

• Section: Centrepiece

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 112 min

“Darya, a writer obsessed with the spiritual resonance of trees, returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter.”

Past memories of twin sisters begin to trouble Darya after the return home. TIFF lists Trees Are Watching as a Turkish production in Kurdish, Turkish and English. Bahman Ghobadi will present the film’s world premiere in Centrepiece.

Djinn Wedding

• Director: Ferit Karahan

• Country: Türkiye

• Section: Platform

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 132 min

“Four estranged siblings reunite in their remote Anatolian village for their sister’s wedding.”

The reunion brings old memories and family tensions back into the present. Ferit Karahan follows the siblings across different stages of their lives, building the film around a family history spanning three generations. Djinn Wedding will compete in TIFF’s Platform section.

Iraq

Atonement

• Director: Reed Van Dyk

• Country: United States

• Section: Gala Presentations

• Premiere: North American Premiere

• Running time: 118 min

“A troubled marine seeks to reconcile with the survivors of an Iraqi family he and his unit fired on back in 2003.”

Reed Van Dyk’s drama returns to the Iraq War through the Marine’s later attempt to meet Mariam, one of the survivors. The cast includes Hiam Abbass, Boyd Holbrook and Kenneth Branagh. The film premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes before travelling to Toronto.

Egypt

The Day I Smoked a Cigarette with My Father

• Directors: Sameh Alaa, Robin Vouters

• Countries: France, Egypt, Belgium

• Section: Short Cuts

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 13 min

“Alaa and his three siblings prepare to welcome their father who is returning from prison.”

Set in Cairo in the 1960s, the animated short is co-directed by Sameh Alaa and Robin Vouters. The project was previously presented at Annecy’s MIFA, where it received development support, and now reaches TIFF as a completed film.

Morocco

Imichki

• Director: Yza Nouiga

• Country: Canada

• Section: Short Cuts

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 15 min

• Language: Amazigh

“In 1975, in a village in southern Morocco, Meriem braves her modesty and illiteracy to find a way to write to her husband.”

The husband has left for France and Meriem has received no news from him. Yza Nouiga places migration and distance inside a small act of communication, in an Amazigh-language short receiving its world premiere at TIFF.

Israel

Our Loves

• Director: Avi Nesher

• Country: Israel

• Section: Centrepiece

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 117 min

“About the ways that love intensifies and second chances are possible in the face of adversity and mayhem.”

Avi Nesher sets the ensemble drama around the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Five characters’ lives become connected during the events of the day. TIFF will present the film’s world premiere in Centrepiece.

Yemen and Libya

Rescue

• Director: Sine Plambech

• Countries: Denmark, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Iceland

• Section: TIFF Docs

• Premiere: World Premiere

• Running time: 90 min

“A Libyan militia intervenes and abducts Roro and the children, dragging them back to Libya.”

Roro is a Yemeni mother travelling across the Mediterranean with her husband Hani and their children. Sine Plambech follows what happens after the family is separated, while also looking at European border policy and the role given to North African authorities along the migration route.

Other MENA Connections at TIFF 2026

A few other films reach TIFF through filmmakers with roots in the region, although their stories belong elsewhere. May el-Toukhy brings Woman Unknown to Centrepiece after its Venice premiere, but the Danish-Swedish-Latvian production is set in postwar Copenhagen. Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari presents Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo in Wavelengths, a film centred on the Japanese filmmaker and political activist Masao Adachi. Hanaël El Yousfi’s The Daughters of Abraham is also part of Discovery, with its story set in Marseille rather than a MENA country.

The Gulf appears through co-production as well. Saudi Arabia is one of the production countries behind Kamila Andini’s Four Seasons in Java, although the story is Indonesian. Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi’s The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, about Shipibo-Konibo artist Sara Flores in Peru, is a Peru-US-Qatar co-production.

These films sit outside the country sections because their MENA connection comes mainly through a filmmaker, diaspora background or production structure. They still form part of the region’s wider presence at TIFF, particularly as Gulf financing and filmmakers from the region continue to move through increasingly international production networks.

Resources

TIFF 2026 Programme & Schedule - Centrepiece - TIFF Docs - Short Cuts - Wavelengths

For more updates on cinema and arts from the Middle East, follow me here.

I have followed most films I could find about oil. Many approached it through extraction, labour, war, environmental damage or economic power. An Incomplete Calendar, directed by Sanaz Sohrabi, took me somewhere less familiar.

We often speak about what oil has done to economies and political systems. Its place in art, music, architecture and visual culture receives much less attention.

Sanaz Sohrabi has spent years researching the visual histories of extraction and the struggle of nations to control their natural resources. In this film, that work appears through music, photographs, newsreels, magazines, postage stamps, letters and oral histories. She uses cinema to bring these materials into conversation, rather than presenting the research as a conventional historical account.

The 77-minute documentary is a co-production between Canada, Iran, Turkey and Venezuela. It screened at the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival in July 2026. Earlier in the year, it had its world premiere in the international competition at Cinéma du Réel in Paris, where it received the Loridan-Ivens First Feature Award and the Young Jury Award.

Oil Beyond a Commodity

The film moves through a period stretching from the early 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s. It follows the nationalisation of oil, the establishment of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Baghdad in 1960, Pan-Arab politics and the use of oil as political leverage in support of the Palestinian liberation movement.

Control over natural resources was closely tied to the wider demand for economic independence across Asia, Africa and Latin America. The film places these histories beside the cultural institutions and artistic projects that grew during the same period.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is one of its most direct examples. Opened in 1977, the museum holds Matter and Mind, also known as Oil Pool, by Japanese artist Noriyuki Haraguchi. The work consists of a large steel basin filled with oil and occupies a central place inside the building.

This image stayed with me. The substance that had financed much of Iran’s rapid development in the 1970s was physically present inside one of the country’s main cultural institutions, dark, reflective and still.

From Tehran, the film reaches the Aula Magna at the Central University of Venezuela. The concert hall is part of the University City of Caracas, a major modernist project connected to Venezuela’s oil-era development. Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva designed the complex, while Alexander Calder created the suspended acoustic panels above the hall, known as the Clouds.

The connection is carried further through music. The Concert Choir of the Central University of Venezuela performed in this space and recorded the album that became the starting point for the film.

Rhymes and Songs for OPEC was released in 1980 to mark the organisation’s 20th anniversary. The Spanish-speaking choir performed folk songs from OPEC member countries phonetically, including songs in Persian, Arabic dialects and Yoruba. Some of the words were difficult for native speakers to understand, yet the record preserves an unusual moment of cultural exchange among oil-producing countries.

An Archive Built From Fragments

An Incomplete Calendar completes Sanaz Sohrabi’s trilogy of essay films about oil, image-making and extraction. One Image, Two Acts, released in 2020, and Scenes of Extraction, released in 2023, worked mainly with materials connected to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the British Petroleum archive.

For this film, she moved towards a different kind of collection.

Over six years, she gathered magazines, political publications, stamps, envelopes, vinyl records, photographs and newsreels. Some came from bookshops and flea markets. Others were found online or sent across countries. Together, they formed an informal archive of energy infrastructure, labour, industrial nationalism and cultural exchange across West Asia, Africa and Latin America.

What held my attention was the physical way these objects were handled.

Much of the archive appears beneath a camera looking down at a table. Hands move photographs and printed pages across the frame. Moving footage is sometimes projected onto still images, while stamps, magazine covers and political documents are placed beside one another.

The arrangement does not hide itself. We see the materials being selected, moved, enlarged and connected. The archive arrives as something assembled in the present, with visible gaps between its pieces.

The chronology follows a similar rhythm. Tehran, Cairo, Caracas and Beirut enter the film at different moments. A political event in one country may be placed beside a song, a magazine or a postage stamp from another.

Sanaz Sohrabi has described the collection as a counter-archive to the visual system created by British Petroleum. Instead of beginning with the corporate images of extraction, she works with objects that circulated among oil-producing nations and within the political and cultural networks of the Global South.

A History Told Through Many Voices

The soundtrack does not depend on a single narrator. Alongside Sanaz Sohrabi, the film includes the voices of Jihan El-Tahri, Murtaza Vali, Laleh Khalili, Layla Maghribi, Eduardo Prato Moros and Leonardo Montaño Salas.

Researchers and filmmakers speak beside former members of the Venezuelan choir. They are usually heard over images and archival material rather than presented through conventional interviews.

In her conversation with Botagoz Koilybayeva for Senses of Cinema, Sanaz Sohrabi described these exchanges as archival conversation sessions. She prepared different groups of photographs, magazines, stamps and recordings for each participant, and allowed the discussion to develop through their responses.

This approach grew from the geography of the production itself. Research and filming took place across Tehran, Cairo, Beirut and Caracas. She has said that a history built through transnational friendships required a chorus rather than a single voice.

The film eventually returns to the Aula Magna.

Leonardo Montaño Salas, a former member of the Concert Choir of the Central University of Venezuela, stands in his former position on the stage and reads part of the film’s script in Persian.

The scene brings the record back into the space where the choir once performed. Persian is heard inside a Venezuelan concert hall built during the oil boom, beneath Alexander Calder’s suspended panels. The moment is simple, but it carries the distance travelled by the film, through languages, buildings, political movements and scattered archives.

Festival Screening

An Incomplete Calendar screened twice in the Regional Panorama section of the 23rd Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival.

The first screening took place on Friday, July 17 at 12:30 PM, followed by a second screening on Saturday, July 18 at 5:30 PM. Both screenings were held at the House of Cinema, H. Malyan Hall, in Yerevan.

Sources and Further Reading

This report was prepared from the film, its official press materials and the following published sources:

• Botagoz Koilybayeva, “What Is a Complete Image of Oil? An Interview with Sanaz Sohrabi,” Senses of Cinema

• Jonathan Ali, “A Chorus, Not a Solo: Sanaz Sohrabi on Disturbing the Visual Regimes of Oil in Her Essay Film Trilogy,” International Documentary Association

• Marc van de Klashorst, “Cinéma du Réel 2026 Review: An Incomplete Calendar,” International Cinephile Society

• Official Film Page, Sanaz Sohrabi

Friends, relatives, streets and homes remain part of a migrant’s life. At the centre of these ties is family: parents, sisters and brothers whose lives continue after one member leaves, but who still carry that person’s absence with them.

In the documentary Past Future Continuous, Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani approach migration from this perspective. The film does not focus on the migrant’s new life at the destination, but on the family, home and country left behind. Cameras installed inside the house offer a means of care and communication across a long distance, while also recording the absence of someone who is no longer there.

Past Future Continuous received the IDFA Award for Best Film in the Envision Competition in 2025. The documentary later screened in the International Full-Length Competition at the 23rd Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, where it received the Silver Apricot in July 2026.

The following conversation with Firouzeh Khosrovani and Morteza Ahmadvand took place in Yerevan during the Golden Apricot festival. It was conducted in Persian and translated into English for publication.

Abbas: The first question is usually where the original idea came from. What first led you towards this subject?

What I saw in Radiograph of a Family was an approach that uses archives and personal stories to address a wider subject. It enters people’s living spaces without looking down at them from above. Instead, the story emerges from within the different layers of their lives.

Is this a path you intend to continue across several films, using similar subjects or forms, or did it develop naturally for this particular project?

Firouzeh: Our subjects are very close to life, to our own experiences and, more broadly, to Iranian society.

A large part of that closeness comes from the fact that migration is on almost everyone’s mind. Every Iranian has thought about leaving at least once, and every Iranian living outside the country has thought about returning at least once.

So the question of leaving and staying is a familiar story.

The cameras and the other ideas within the film also came from several familiar situations and examples close to us, from experiences that Morteza and I had encountered.

Abbas: While developing the story, did you consider that the people in the house might object to the cameras, resist them or say, “You have invaded my private space”? Or would they eventually accept them? Did you think about showing such a reaction in the film?

Morteza: Yes. We dealt with that issue in considerable detail in the early drafts.

When you first come across something unusual, like installing cameras for elderly people, it seems striking. For example, I had a friend in Canada whose mother died while we were working on the film.

He had installed a camera in a similar way. It was pointed towards the chair where his mother always sat to watch television. After she died, the camera remained on for a long time, still watching that empty chair.

We found the situation very interesting. But later, when we researched it and spoke to someone who installed CCTV systems, we discovered that cameras are often installed for elderly people and children, not only for ordinary home security.

The early drafts included many different positive and negative experiences, as well as numerous contradictions. We even considered establishing a direct exchange between Maryam and her parents, allowing them to narrate parts of the story. But once we removed the parents’ voices, many of those sections disappeared too.

In the end, the idea of the cameras, together with the image of Maryam hiding beneath a sheepskin and similar motifs, provided a framework for the film's opening.

Even when we talk about the film, we do not place too much emphasis on describing it as a film about CCTV cameras or about watching someone from a distance. At a certain point, the film turns towards the idea of the homeland. The cameras become a way of looking at the country the migrant has left behind.

All these ideas created a structure through which we could work on the central concept, shape it and turn it into an artwork.

Abbas: Something else that really caught my attention was the positioning of the cameras. The mise-en-scene, the arrangement of the space, the lenses and the composition of the frames were very strong.

The elements are carefully placed, with the father and mother positioned on opposite sides. Could you talk a little about the film’s cinematography?

Firouzeh: Everything was designed with a great deal of care and patience. Even when we were designing the set, we went into considerable detail in shaping the house.

Everything the audience sees in the image had been designed repeatedly on paper. Every detail you noticed was something we had thought about, including every human figure.

For example, we did not want our two non-professional actors to move too close to the cameras, because that would distort their bodies and faces. Their positions in relation to the camera always had to be carefully designed.

We even moved objects each time we placed a camera in a different part of the house.

Then we had to decide which lenses would create the least distortion or curvature while still looking as much as possible like genuine CCTV footage.

Morteza paid attention even to details such as image noise. We wanted it to seem as though we were seeing exactly what Maryam was seeing on her monitor.

So we had to ensure that every image appeared to be coming through Maryam’s own devices.

Building a Film from Different Images

Abbas: Unless I am mistaken, the film contains four different types of image: the CCTV footage, material filmed in Iran, material filmed in the United States, and the archive images and artworks.

How did these different images come together in the edit? Many of them have very different visual qualities, particularly the artworks, which seem to belong to a separate space.

You have tried to connect them through narration and storytelling. The voices of Leili Rashidi and Ali Mosaffa appear to bring them together. Could you explain how these images found a relationship with one another during the editing process?

Morteza: Whenever someone asks how we brought them together, I say, “With a great deal of effort,” because we had very different kinds of material.

Let me give you an example. When you are working on a painting and trying to place an image within the canvas, you begin with a broad composition. You draw the initial design and then, depending on the harmony you want to reach, you may first add the lighter areas, then the darker ones, and finally apply the glazes.

It is a process of gradually reaching the harmony you have in mind. It is also highly technical and time-consuming. It takes shape by placing things together, removing them and putting them back.

Exactly as you said, we repeatedly sat down and listed the kinds of material we had.

We divided them into four groups of images and designed timelines for them. On the timeline, we would note that, for example, around the fifteenth minute we needed a particular kind of image.

At that stage, we were not even discussing the subject matter. We were only talking about the texture and quality of the image. Here we had a sharp, filmed Full HD image, while somewhere else we had a noisy image.

Once all of that had been arranged, the images had to establish the right thematic relationship with one another and serve the narrative.

When that stage was complete, we still had an extensive post-production process ahead of us. I remember Mohammad Haddadi, our cinematographer, also working with us on colour correction and post-production.

To reach the harmony we wanted, we genuinely used every tool that post-production made available to us.

One of the things that makes me happy is that, from the outside, films like this can look simple, as though only a few images have been placed next to one another. But in my opinion, the effort required to achieve that simplicity is far greater than in many projects that use extensive visual effects or place their subject in the service of technique.

Just yesterday, after the screening, someone asked me the same question: “How did you manage to make this?”

I said, “With a great deal of work. We spent more than five years on it.”

They said, “Really? I thought you had made it very quickly, under pressure, last summer.”

I asked, “Why did you think that?”

They replied, “I’m a filmmaker, and I simply couldn’t believe it.”

But even if that is the impression the film gives, I am happy. The time you have invested in an artwork is not something that should be displayed to the audience.

Ultimately, the audience should experience a fluid work. Whether we spent five years, ten years or any other amount of time on it is not something we need to push into the viewer’s face.

Firouzeh: when you have a consistent visual language, a clear camera approach, a screenplay and a defined mise-en-scene, the process can move forward much more smoothly.

But when you are constructing 76 minutes piece by piece, and none of our shots lasted longer than a minute or a minute and a half, you have to weave them together.

The narrative keeps moving through a voice-over, and you constantly have to see whether that voice works with the image.

It is what Morteza always says: where the elements should be in harmony and where they should be in contrast.

The work is like weaving. You weave it together in very small pieces and gradually move forward. You do not have the advantage of a ten-minute sequence.

Look at the video artworks, for example. Some last only 50 seconds. Organising all this material, and managing the dialectic between the text, meaning the words, and the frame, was very difficult.

We are both meticulous. Some of our characteristics are similar, while some are different, and those differences actually helped the layered nature of the work.

Morteza might say, for example, that after seeing a particular image, a sentence should arrive one beat later.

All of this took an enormous amount of time in the editing and sound design.

It is clear that films like this cannot be made in a hurry. You have to keep the heat low and allow them to simmer slowly until everything settles into place.

Abbas: I also have a question about the archive material. Where did those photographs and stories come from? There was, for example, a childhood photograph of Maryam. Were those materials real and did they belong to the same Maryam, or did they come from another story? Did you ever create material based on what you knew?

Firouzeh: First of all, our Maryam is not one person. There is more than one Maryam, because we wanted Maryam to represent every migrant.

She is anyone who has left, especially someone who has left and cannot return. She also represents all of us who have experienced leaving and being away for a period of time.

During the pitching sessions, we always said, “Maryam is all of us. I am Maryam, and you are Maryam.”

But I had a friend named Maryam who had a very good archive. So we had access to well-preserved, high-quality material. Whenever an image fitted our text, the sequence of scenes or the turning points in the film, we used it.

The process of selection and removal was therefore extensive.

Abbas: Could you also explain the artworks, particularly the video installation Flight, and how your broader visual-art practice, which has also been documented by Centre Pompidou, shaped the visual language of Past Future Continuous?

Morteza: At a certain point, we decided to move away from the conventional use of archive material.

For example, in Radiograph of a Family, we had used archival images to address the subject of the revolution. Images of the revolution have been seen many times, so we began looking for alternatives.

The most immediate option was the material we already had. These video artworks came directly from our own hard drives and archives.

Much of the archival material used in the film had not been created specifically for this project. Some of it had been sitting on a hard drive for ten years, waiting for the day when ten or twenty seconds of it might become useful.

These images come from my own video artworks, pieces that have shaped my visual world and artistic language over many years. From the beginning, we did not want them to function merely as decorative or graphic elements. We wanted them to enter the narrative as a metaphorical layer.

When we introduced them into the film, we saw that this visual language connected naturally with the film’s world and created new meanings. That encouraged us to strengthen their presence and extend them through different parts of the film.

For example, in the scene where the fish move in the shallow basin of an empty pool, they are really an extension of the metaphor of the bird, the same blue bird that appears several times throughout the film. Sometimes it is inside the frame, while at other times only the trace of its image remains.

It is the same absent presence at the centre of the story: the migrant far from home, continually looking back at the place left behind and the path already travelled.

It was important to me that these motifs should emerge from my own mental and artistic archive, rather than being designed only for this project. The video artworks are therefore not simply visual elements. They are part of my memory and personal world, and here, in dialogue with documentary reality, they have acquired a new meaning.

More broadly, the film’s visual language comes directly from my long practice in painting, video art and installation. I did not approach this project as a documentary filmmaker borrowing from visual art. I approached it as a visual artist discovering what cinema could become.

The birds, the fish, the layered images and the house as a living presence all emerged from a visual vocabulary I had been developing for many years. Past Future Continuous became the meeting point between that visual world and Firouzeh’s documentary practice, and that dialogue ultimately shaped the film’s cinematic language.

I had previously experimented with multi-channel images in different ways, including the video installation Flight. Its nine channels corresponded with the idea of CCTV cameras. We took that idea and presented it in a different form, placing it in the service of the film’s central metaphor.

The rain that moves upwards came from a reversed work made in 2011, which we reconstructed using a photograph by Abbas Kasri, the same image of Mount Damavand that appears elsewhere in the film.

The image used in the end credits, the cage on which the birds come and sit, was also taken from a cube video artwork.

We placed these works in the film, saw that they worked, and then filmed or reconstructed them again according to the needs of the present project. The final one was an exception.

That last video has a visibly lower image quality because it dates from 2010, and we did not use the entire piece.

I should also mention a few names so they are not overlooked. Our young and very talented editor, Solmaz Eftekhari, devoted a great deal of time and care to the film.

I have already mentioned Mohammad Haddadi, our cinematographer.

We also had a unique experience while developing the text. For a period of around eight days, I think, we went into a house with Naghmeh Samini and spent the entire day talking about the text and writing it.

Naghmeh would write, and then we would take the text and work on it again. Before that, we had also worked together online for around three months.

A great deal of the film’s good fortune came from Firouzeh’s strong relationships. Some of the best people came to support the film.

We had exceptional friends and colleagues who helped us with real commitment.

Interestingly, they often had similar experiences themselves. Either migration and the homeland they had left behind were part of their own lives, or someone close to them had gone through such an experience.

That is how the video artworks entered the film.

The House and the Person Who Left

Abbas: Something I found interesting is that we do not see migration only from the perspective of the person who has left. We also see it from the perspective of those who stayed.

You have shown both sides of this separation. Ali Mosaffa’s voice represented the house and those who remained, while Leili Rashidi’s voice represented those who had left.

We Iranians have a deep attachment to our country, our homes and our families, and it is very difficult for us to let go of them. Could you talk a little more about this perspective in the film?

Firouzeh: Yes. We wanted to look primarily at the effect of migration on the country of origin, meaning Iran.

The story of a migrant, the life that a migrant builds elsewhere, has been told many times. Our concern was not to follow who Maryam was becoming in America, what she was doing or how she was living.

From the beginning, we wanted to show Maryam’s empty place.

It is the empty place left by the migrant. Whenever one person leaves a home, the light in one room goes out. That empty space, that absence, cannot be filled by anything else.

Our homes are gradually losing the presence of their best children. Iran is a country that is losing its children every day.

Morteza: There was no single, fixed position from which we could say exactly what Ali Mosafa's voice represented or did not represent.

We consciously avoided defining that voice too clearly until the second half of the film.

The voice wants to be the house. For a foreign audience, there can even be a misunderstanding that it is the father’s voice. Some people did interpret it that way.

For more than half the film, almost the first two-thirds, that possibility remains open. It could be any of those things.

It is only at the end that the voice clearly becomes the house. Then the house grows into something larger than itself. It can become the homeland.

That idea also went through a long process before taking its final form.

I can confidently say that nothing in this film was selected casually or without considering ten other alternatives.

Whenever an idea entered the film and remained there, we had probably considered nine or ten other possibilities before choosing it.

We never suddenly attached ourselves to something and said, “This is good. We have found it,” and then kept it unchanged until the end.

The voice-over went through the same process. It was written several times in different forms: a male voice with extensive details, the father’s voice, the mother’s voice, until it finally reached the form you now hear.

What you see and hear in the film went through a very long process.

There is also an important point that may be less visible, and I would like to mention it. There is actually very little text in the film.

When we placed this short text beneath the images, we became terrified about what to do with the empty spaces. There was a real sense of fear.

It was the same during the editing. An editor usually needs a source of sound to establish a rhythm.

The final days of editing coincided with the twelve-day war. We had to finish the edit and then move on to the sound.

Through Leila Maleki’s work, we created openings and gaps in the sound. The rhythm emerged through those gaps and silences.

The easiest thing for a sound designer is to fill the soundtrack. This was much more difficult. In some places, the sound first had to be filled and then emptied again.

Until the final moments, we had long and difficult discussions about this approach to sound and point of view.

This also leads into the way we worked together. I had some smaller experiences before entering this field, but my first feature-length documentary experience was clearly my collaboration on Radiograph of a Family.

A Shared Visual Language

Abbas: Could you explain how your collaboration worked?

Morteza: Our shared language is visual art. Most of the examples we discussed during the process came from visual art rather than cinema.

Visual art has a much longer and more extensive history, with many compelling examples and references that can be borrowed for the world of the moving image.

I deliberately use the term “moving image” rather than cinema.

For me, there is no fundamental difference. At one point, your material may be canvas, paint and painting. At another, it may be frames and design. At another, it may be film. For me, they have always belonged to the same continuum.

Firouzeh brought her own experience and the different works she had made, and an interesting dialogue developed between us.

We each maintained our own perspective. At times, both of us insisted on particular choices. But the result was that a shared visual language gradually emerged between us.

Firouzeh: Being image-based is very important.

Many people enter cinema through literature and work primarily with words. They are word-driven. We are image-driven, and our point of departure has always been the image.

It could even begin with a painting.

There were many occasions when we looked at the work of a Danish painter and thought about building our visual aesthetic around a particular artwork, in terms of colour, light or mise-en-scene.

We often begin with the image and move towards the story afterwards.

There is a broad concept, but that concept is itself based on an image.

First the image, then the word.

Creating a Presence Through Absence

Abbas: There was one sequence, one frame, that I loved. I called it “pure art”. It was the moment when they danced in front of the cameras.

Each of them was in front of a separate camera, with a clearly defined angle. There was the house, the loneliness, their effort to bring happiness, and someone watching them from somewhere else.

I expected us to see them from the front, through the lenses of those cameras. But when I thought about it later, I realised how pure the scene was. It felt as though we were both inside the frame and watching other people within it.

Was that scene inspired by something, or did it develop during the process?

Firouzeh: No. It came from the idea that they should not dance with each other. They should dance with the wall and dance for the camera.

Even we did not know whether it would work. I remember Morteza saying, “Let’s see whether it becomes useful later,” because we also filmed a lot of material that was eventually discarded.

But the scene worked so well that, at one point, we considered opening the film with it.

Then we realised that it would be better to begin with the installation of the cameras. If we had started with the dancing, the audience would have been confused for a long time before understanding what was happening.

We first needed to establish that cameras had been installed in the house. Then we could show the parents’ gesture of dancing for the cameras to make Maryam happy.

Because the film gradually moves towards the sadness of absence, we also had to design moments of happiness.

This was one of the places where there was life, health and still a sense of joy. It carried the love of parents who want to say, “We are fine.”

I often think about parents who tell their children, “Do not worry about us. We are fine.”

They may be physically weak, losing their abilities or living with serious pain, but they still say this to their children.

That is pure love. Unconditional love, simply as it is.

Abbas: As the film travelled to different festivals, how did non-Iranian audiences respond to it?

I am also thinking about audiences in places with extensive experiences of migration, such as Eastern Europe, the Arab world and North Africa.

Firouzeh: I do not think there is much difference between Iranian and non-Iranian audiences in terms of the film’s emotional impact.

Just yesterday, someone said there was nothing in the film that could only have happened in Iran.

Human relationships are not fundamentally different. The love and concern a child feels for ageing parents is the same, regardless of whether the distance is long or short.

You may even live in the same city and still experience the same feeling.

Everyone can eventually recognise something of their own parents in the film.

Leaving the family home, the homeland and childhood memories is a form of pain, a feeling and a shared global experience.

So I do not think there is anything in the film that only someone raised within Iranian culture can understand while a foreign viewer cannot.

I do not see it that way.

Abbas: Has anyone said something to you after a screening that has remained in your mind?

Morteza: Let me explain what Firouzeh has just said in another way, through an example from visual art.

In a somewhat imprecise division, if you separate visual art into figurative and abstract work, then in contemporary art, moving towards abstraction often increases a work’s capacity to enter an international conversation.

When you restrict yourself to highly local signs, the viewer may need a historical or cultural understanding of that specific culture in order to connect with the work.

But if you can reach an appropriate degree of abstraction, the possibility of entering an intercultural or international conversation becomes greater.

I believe this film has succeeded partly for that reason.

First, it does not approach migration through highly local signs. As far as possible, it deals with the subject through abstraction.

Its use of metaphor works in the same way. Throughout the visual history of the world, birds have been connected with migration. They do not belong only to us. The fish do not belong only to us either.

There are also the ways we use human images. When the camera deliberately rotates, you see people who appear East Asian, as well as people who may appear African.

Even now, when I watch the film, my eye follows one of those faces, despite having seen the film dozens of times and moved through it more than a hundred times in the edit.

Let me give you an example. At a screening in Taiwan, I came out of the cinema and saw a young Chinese woman who was deeply affected and expressing her emotions to her friend. You could see that something had happened to her.

Then she came over and spoke about her experience. She had been forced to leave China for Taiwan and could not return.

She described going through exactly the same experience with her own family.

There have been many examples like that.

Just yesterday, during the screening here, I stepped outside for part of the film. When I came back, I wanted to observe something I always find interesting: how the faces in the audience connect with the image on the screen.

When I looked at them, it seemed that a strong emotional connection had formed and that they were closely following the film.

Let me add one final point. I often say the same thing about Radiograph of a Family.

I like to remind the audience that they have watched a film without ever seeing its central character.

You are following someone you have never seen.

I find that very exciting. There is something deeply satisfying about creating a presence through someone’s absence.

Everyone talks about Maryam, and I have to remind them that they have never actually seen her.

The audience identifies with someone whose absence, in my opinion, creates a stronger presence.

Maryam’s absence gives birth to her presence within the viewer. People begin to see themselves as Maryam.

If Maryam had appeared in any concrete form, if a real Maryam had been presented like the figurative artwork I mentioned, she would inevitably have become distant from part of the audience.

Her absence allows everyone to imagine Maryam in relation to themselves.

I think this is one of the reasons people become attached to the film.

Abbas: Something else I noticed was that questions of gender and the difficulties faced by women in Iran did not directly enter the film. Even Maryam did not seem strongly defined by gender. I found that very interesting.

Morteza: Yes. Every artwork is ultimately a series of choices.

You can address those subjects. You can borrow or use signs connected with those issues.

For example, Maryam is a woman, and she may face additional difficulties. You can choose that path and probably bring part of the audience with you, especially if that is your central concern.

Or you can decide not to follow that path and consider a different audience.

It was a conscious decision. Maryam’s absence was intended to allow the audience to internalise the story, to see it within their own inner mirror and begin imagining her.

If that happens, the film has achieved what it wanted. If it does not, then this was simply the extent of what we were able to do.

Abbas: It is clear that both of you have moved away from addressing people’s immediate, everyday concerns directly.

Firouzeh: No, those are social concerns.

If we had chosen to address them, the result would not have been this film. It would have become another film. The weight of the work would have changed, and a different perspective would have entered it, one that was not ours.

We also avoid familiar forms of lament. We always want to take things further, to make them more widely applicable and more universal.

This was something we paid close attention to in Radiograph of a Family as well.

We wanted to create metaphors, to make certain elements more symbolic, to avoid unnecessary explanation and to leave some things unsaid, allowing the audience to construct them through their own imagination and move with the film.

That was something we consciously pursued.

Neither of us wanted to bring seasonal subjects or the immediate concerns of the day into the work in a way that would give it an expiry date.

The work needed to move beyond that and have a longer life.

It should be possible to watch and feel it in different periods, without it belonging only to one particular moment.

Abbas: Tell me one thing about the film that you have never said anywhere before.

Firouzeh: After all these years of working together, I often think about the life an idea goes through, from its one-line beginning until it reaches its final form, and about how much we grow with it and how our experiences are shaped along the way.

We often have to let go of ideas that were initially very important to us. As the expression goes, “Kill your darling.”

This was one example. Let me describe what felt like a small miracle.

We kept thinking about finding someone who could play our Maryam.

We considered different faces. We even asked a friend named Mahnaz to become Maryam for us. We filmed several tests, and when we were making the trailer, the idea of the bird had not yet entered the project.

People kept asking, “Why do we not see Maryam?”

Because the story was built around Maryam, they needed to believe in her in order to believe in the story itself.

So we thought about it a great deal.

At one point, we considered filming a house in the United States and showing a presence only from behind, perhaps a shadow or a hand, without revealing her face, as though she were watching the cameras.

One day, Morteza and I were sitting in a cafe in Turin, in northern Italy. We were due to meet Naghmeh Samini the following day.

We were drinking coffee and talking. There was a paper napkin and a pen on the table.

Morteza said, “What if she were a bird?”

It was as though a spark had suddenly appeared. After that, the film was transformed. It felt as though we had found another opening.

That was it.

We both accepted the idea very quickly. When Naghmeh arrived and we told her, she also responded very positively.

The bird introduced the deeper symbolic layer we had been searching for and helped complete the film.

It gave the film the symbolic quality we had been searching for. It also created what you mentioned, something that is not defined by gender.

Reaching the right element was one of our greatest achievements.

At that point, we were also thinking about the Simurgh, whose story is told at the beginning of the film.

Its metaphorical capacity was enormous, and it found a natural harmony with the work.

A Screening in Yerevan

Abbas: Could you also talk about the festival? How was the screening, and how did the audience respond? You were not present for the first screening.

Morteza: We were not here for the first screening. We arrived for the second one, which was yesterday.

I thought it went very well.

Golden Apricot takes place in the lovely city of Yerevan, and the staff working here are warm, young and wonderful people.

There are strong filmmakers here, and some very good Iranian films as well.

We have not attended many festivals with this film. Since it began its journey, there has either been a war or the events of January 2026, so we have travelled to only a small number of festivals.

But among the few festivals we have attended in person, this has been one of the most welcoming.

There is also a strong sense of cultural closeness between us and this place.

I like to close my eyes and forget that I am in another country.

My genuine feeling during these days is that Yerevan is very similar to Iran. At most, it feels as though I have travelled from Tehran to Tabriz. It does not feel much further than that.

This cultural closeness also contributes to the warmth of the atmosphere.

Firouzeh: Something that has just occurred to me, and something I think we can genuinely be proud of, is that through our collaboration we developed a clear working method.

Much of that came from Morteza’s ability to use different kinds of exercises on paper, with both images and words. It was extremely helpful.

Very often, it felt as though we built the film once on paper, using a series of diagrams. It was something like storyboarding, but much freer and more flexible.

This gave us an overview of the whole film.

We constantly drew the timeline. We would say, for example, that the film begins in one way, that this is the end of its first third, that this is its middle, and that the second third introduces a particular subject.

It was very enjoyable.

We were designing the film’s dramatic structure, its use of time, its rises and falls, and the economy with which we used archive material and video art.

The right dosage was important. Everything needed to be measured. The film should not become verbose. Each element needed to be justified, simple and intimate.

All of that was very enjoyable. We have kept the papers.

As a result, the process behind the film was exciting and playful. It had the quality of a game.

From the beginning, it forced us to ask: where does the film end? Where do we place its beginning and ending? Where is its middle? Where should we define the key turning points?

We had to understand where something needed to be introduced on paper, where a new subject should appear, and where something should suddenly be revealed and create a shift.

All of this had been carefully considered.

So when we finally entered the real field of production, we were very well prepared.

I would like to thank Firouzeh Khosrovani and Morteza Ahmadvand for taking the time to speak with Souzian Dispatch in Yerevan.

Past Future Continuous screened twice in the International Full-Length Competition at the 23rd Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival: on Sunday, July 12 at 11:00 AM and Friday, July 17 at 6:00 PM, both at Nairi Cinema.

More About the Film

The 76-minute documentary follows Maryam, an Iranian woman living in the United States, who installs surveillance cameras in her elderly parents’ home in Tehran. The cameras become a fragile connection to her family, her memories and the country she left behind. The film is an Iran, Norway and Italy co-production.

• IDFA film page

• Golden Apricot film page

• Taskovski Films page

Festival Journey and Awards

Past Future Continuous had its world premiere at Giornate degli Autori, Venice Days, in 2025. It later screened at festivals including IDFA, Göteborg Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Sydney Film Festival and Golden Apricot.

Selected Awards

• Special Mention, Cinema & Art Award, Giornate degli Autori, 2025

• IDFA Award for Best Film, Envision Competition, 2025

• Golden Firebird Award, Documentary Competition, Hong Kong International Film Festival, 2026

• Silver Apricot, International Full-Length Competition, Golden Apricot, 2026

The lineup includes two Iranian features, Palestinian films in Spotlight and Venice Open, a Lebanese feature and short, Halkawt Mustafa’s Kurdish story set around Mosul, and Levan Koguashvili’s Georgian drama Guria. Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy and Israeli director Amos Gitai also appear in the programme.

Two Films With Iranian Directors

Ali Asgari will compete for the Golden Lion with Kami Nour (A Bit of Light), an 87-minute co-production between Iran, Switzerland, Italy, Canada and Türkiye.

The film centres on an Iranian doctor whose medical practice is shut down after his arrest. Having lost faith in his future, he decides to end his life. A final day spent with his family begins to disturb the certainty of that decision.

This is Asgari’s first film in Venice’s main competition. He previously presented Disappearance at the festival in 2017, while Divine Comedy screened in Orizzonti last year. Salaud Morisset is handling worldwide sales for the new film.

Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Gharaei returns with Moragheb (Falling House), which will premiere in Orizzonti.

The 124-minute Iran-US-Germany production is set around a family living on the outskirts of Tehran, where a redevelopment project threatens their home. Rashid, a prison guard facing accusations of corruption, also discovers that his eldest daughter Ensi is preparing to leave Iran for a modelling career.

As pressure grows both inside and outside the house, Mohsen Gharaei brings together questions of authority, family and emigration. Falling House is his latest feature after Blockage, which won the New Currents Award at Busan in 2017. Paradise City Sales represents international sales.

Palestine, Lebanon and Georgia in Venezia Spotlight

Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan will present Hiwar ma’ albahr (Conversation With The Sea) in Venezia Spotlight.

Kamal, a 60-year-old Palestinian man in Jerusalem, is ordered by an Israeli court to pay a social security debt attributed to his son Wael. The problem is that Kamal believes Wael drowned in the Red Sea decades earlier. When no official record of his death can be found, he begins searching for what happened.

The 112-minute film is a co-production between Palestine, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Lebanese filmmaker Rami Kodeih joins the same section with Furies, set against Lebanon’s banking crisis.

Two women, unable to access their own savings, plan an overnight bank robbery to recover the money they need for a life-saving operation. The Lebanon-Brazil production runs 133 minutes.

Georgian filmmaker Levan Koguashvili is also in Venezia Spotlight with Guria.

The 118-minute film is set in a Georgian village, where a widowed hazelnut farmer is struggling with poverty, power cuts and the search for a fair price for his harvest, while also hoping for another chance at love.

Guria is a co-production between Georgia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Türkiye, Norway and Saudi Arabia.

Gaza and a Kurdish Story Outside Competition

Ahmed Hassouna’s Al Mowaten Osama (Citizen Osama) will screen in Venice Open - Out of Competition.

Filmed in northern Gaza, the 68-minute France-Palestine documentary stays close to Osama, a former artistic photographer who has become a war documentarian. As he records the destruction around him, he is also trying to protect his wife and newborn child.

Halkawt Mustafa’s No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman is also part of Venice Open.

Vyan, a Kurdish sniper, returns to Mosul after learning that her younger sister, believed missing since the 2014 ISIS assault, may still be alive. The journey forces her back into a city marked by war and into memories she has spent years trying to suppress.

The 110-minute film is a co-production between Norway, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Sweden.

Lebanon and Iran in the Orizzonti Shorts

The regional presence also extends to the Orizzonti short-film competition.

Lebanese-Moroccan filmmaker Shaden Safieddine Tazi is in the section with Quelques instants de bonheur (A Few Moments of Happiness). The 18-minute documentary follows a young Lebanese filmmaker in Paris watching the war in Lebanon unfold through her phone, using screen recordings, family voices and silence to record the distance between her life abroad and events at home.

Iranian-born animator Amir Houshang Moein will also present the 10-minute French production Bleu au loin (Distant Blue).

Amos Gitai Returns With The Road to Jericho

Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai will present The Road to Jericho in the non-fiction part of Venice Open - Out of Competition.

The 90-minute France-UK-Israel documentary travels from Jerusalem towards Jericho, connecting the geography of the road with the political history of the area.

Along the route, Gitai stops at Khan al-Ahmar, the Bedouin community east of Jerusalem that has faced threats of demolition. The journey gives the film a geographical frame for looking at land, memory and the unresolved political history around Jerusalem, Jericho and the West Bank.

May el-Toukhy in the Golden Lion Competition

Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy will compete for the Golden Lion with Kvinde Ukendt (Woman Unknown).

Set in Denmark after the Second World War, the film centres on Marie, a young housemaid preparing to marry her wealthy, older employer, while a secret from the war years threatens her new position.

The 124-minute film is produced by Denmark, Sweden and Latvia. Its connection to this regional overview comes through el-Toukhy’s Egyptian background rather than the film’s setting or production. Her previous feature, Queen of Hearts, won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance in 2019.

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival takes place on the Lido from 2 to 12 September 2026.

For more updates on cinema and arts from the MENA, follow me here.

Magma, the first feature documentary by Mia Bendrimia, begins from a more internal and private angle: from family silence, from things that have not been said directly, and from a filmmaker’s attempt to understand the Algerian part of her own identity.

I watched Magma through the online programme of Sheffield DocFest. The film had its world premiere in the festival’s International First Feature Competition, and later won the Grand Jury Award in the same section.

Bendrimia grew up in France, far from many parts of her Algerian roots. In the film, she begins to ask what happened inside her family during the Algerian War of Independence and after the end of French colonial rule.

The answers do not come simply or clearly. Her family history moves across different sides of this conflict, with contradictions, painful silences and memories that do not easily sit together. What begins as a personal question about identity slowly becomes a way of looking at Algeria’s past from inside a family.

This was what I liked most about the film. Mia does not use her own story only as a soft entry point into a larger historical subject. She allows the family story to remain difficult, and does not rush to turn it into a neat and clean explanation.

The Director’s Point Of View And Camera In Presenting The Narratives

There are moments when the film stays very close to faces, rooms and pauses. The framing often makes simple conversations feel heavier than they seem on the surface. The film does not become openly dramatic, but the camera angles create a quiet pressure. As a viewer, you feel that asking a question can move something that has remained still and untouched for years.

For me, this is why Magma feels honest. The film understands that family history is not made only of facts. It is also made of avoidance, hesitation, shame, affection and the small changes in people’s faces, especially when the past comes too close.

The personal story and the national story keep moving toward each other. Mia’s search for belonging is placed beside Algeria’s history of colonialism, revolution, loyalty, accusation and survival. The film moves between these two lines without pretending that one can fully explain the other.

This point matters, because the film is facing a history where labels can become dangerous. In times of war and political rupture, people are quickly reduced to words such as loyal, traitor, victim or survivor. The film does not ignore responsibility, but it also does not make judgment too easy.

For many viewers from the Middle East and North Africa, this situation may feel familiar. In societies shaped by colonial history, conflict or state pressure, private life rarely remains fully private. A family memory, a silence, a relationship, even an old story can carry political meaning.

Mia Bendrimia uses personal images, traces of archive, drawing, collage, performance and carefully composed frames. These elements help the film speak about memories that are broken, incomplete or lost. The drawings and collages give shape to the gaps, to the parts of the story that cannot be easily reconstructed.

The title of the film is simple, but it stays in the mind. Magma stays beneath the surface. It is still moving, still hot, even when we cannot see it. The past in Bendrimia’s film works in the same way. It does not remain behind the characters. It moves beneath the life of the present.

Magma is a personal documentary that, through one filmmaker’s search for her Algerian identity, opens a larger question: about family silence, colonial memory and the difficult work of understanding where we come from.

- Abbas Souzian

Magma had its World Premiere at Sheffield DocFest 2026 in the International First Feature Competition, where it won the Grand Jury Award.

The film screened in Sheffield on Friday, June 12 at 6:15 PM at Showroom - Screen 2, and on Saturday, June 13 at 12:45 PM at The Light - Screen 6.

• Read more on the official Sheffield DocFest film page:
  https://www.sheffdocfest.com/film/magma

• Follow Mia Bendrimia on Instagram:
  https://www.instagram.com/mia_bendream

About Magma

Magma is a documentary by Mia Bendrimia about a filmmaker searching for answers about her Algerian family’s ties to both sides of the Independence War.

As she looks into the hidden past of her family, Bendrimia uncovers a tangle of buried and contradicting histories. What begins as a personal search for identity slowly opens into a wider reflection on colonial memory, family silence, Algeria’s history, and the difficult work of understanding where we come from.

The film, directed by Lebanese filmmaker Karim Kassem, premiered in the Crystal Globe Competition at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

In Pipes, Ghassan Saad plays Hassan, a retired water authority worker who spent years dealing with the village’s pipes and water problems. Retirement has not changed everything. When something breaks, people still come looking for him.

Then the village’s main water supply stops working.

The timing is difficult for Hassan. A close friend has recently died in circumstances he does not fully understand, and his questions about the death begin to unfold alongside the growing water crisis.

Rather than pushing these two strands forward quickly, Karim Kassem stays close to Hassan’s daily life. Conversations, small routines and periods of silence are given space, while the mystery surrounding his friend’s death develops gradually in the background.

That same pace shapes the way the film is shot. Karim Kassem, who also served as cinematographer, often holds on scenes rather than cutting quickly between them. The village and its damaged water system slowly become part of Hassan’s own experience of grief, ageing and responsibility.

Written by Karim Kassem and Nadia Hassan, Pipes runs for 114 minutes and was completed in 2025 as a co-production between Lebanon, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

For Karim Kassem, the film follows Only The Winds (2020), Octopus (2021), Thiiird (2023) and Moondove (2024). Across these works, the Lebanese filmmaker has often stayed close to ordinary lives shaped by the social and economic conditions of contemporary Lebanon.

At Karlovy Vary, however, the attention returned to Ghassan Saad. A 71-year-old non-professional actor left the festival with its Best Actor Award, giving Pipes one of the main prizes of its world premiere.

Film Details

Pipes
Director: Karim Kassem
Screenplay: Karim Kassem, Nadia Hassan
Cinematography: Karim Kassem
Countries: Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia
Year: 2025
Runtime: 114 minutes
Section: Crystal Globe Competition
Premiere: World Premiere
Award: Best Actor, Ghassan Saad

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Chairing the Regional Competition

Kalari chaired the Regional Competition jury alongside musician Ibrahim Maalouf, producer Dominique Welinski, and filmmakers Pieter-Jan De Pue and Christine Haroutounian.

The jury awarded the Golden Apricot to Iranian filmmaker Amir Azizi’s Inside Amir. Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf received the Silver Apricot and also won the FIPRESCI Prize.

Talking Cinematography at Cinema House

Kalari also joined the DoPing Cinematography Workshops, part of the 2026 GAIFF Pro programme organised in partnership with the Armenian Cinematographers’ Guild.

The programme brought cinematographers including Kalari, Bruno Delbonnel and Seamus McGarvey to Cinema House for workshops and masterclasses. Golden Apricot describes Kalari as a former award-winning photographer who has shot more than 65 feature films and worked with filmmakers including Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

During his masterclass, Kalari spoke about his early years in photography and reflected on working with Kiarostami and Farhadi. He discussed the different methods of the two directors and how the cinematographer’s role changes according to the filmmaker and the needs of each project.

The DoPing Cinematography Workshops were held at Cinema House from 15 to 17 July 2026.

From Photography to Iranian Cinema

Photography came before cinematography in Kalari’s career and remained part of his work long before he became known internationally as a cinematographer.

Over several decades, his cinematography has become closely connected with different generations of Iranian filmmakers. Among his credits are Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Panahi’s Offside, Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila and Farhadi’s A Separation. His work on A Separation received the Silver Frog at Camerimage in 2011.

In 2018, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented The Eye of Iran: Cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari, a programme of 12 films by ten directors, including Kalari himself. The retrospective looked at his work across several periods of contemporary Iranian cinema.

Life’s Performance

On 19 July, Mahmoud Kalari opened his photography exhibition Life’s Performance at 32 Hanrapetutyan Street in Yerevan.

The exhibition presents photographs he made in Iran during the 1970s. The images were printed by Mahmoud Kalari himself and are being shown in the former Persian Consulate building as part of Golden Apricot and Rambalkoshe’s musæum project.

The exhibition opened at 14:00 on 19 July and remains on view through 26 July.

The photographs offer a view of Kalari’s work before the feature films that later made his name familiar to international cinema audiences.

Parajanov’s Thaler at the Closing Ceremony

Mahmoud Kalari was also honoured during Golden Apricot’s closing ceremony on 19 July, receiving the festival’s Parajanov’s Thaler. His award was presented after a week in which he had chaired the Regional Competition jury and taken part in the festival’s cinematography programme.

The Parajanov’s Thaler is one of Golden Apricot’s honorary awards, presented for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema. Its name and design come directly from the story of Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov.

In 1976, while imprisoned, Parajanov carved figures with his fingernails into the aluminium lids of milk bottles and called them “thalers”. The original pieces are now kept at the Sergei Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, while the festival award is a silver reproduction of one of those coins.

Golden Apricot concluded on 19 July, while Kalari’s photography exhibition Life’s Performance remains open in Yerevan through 26 July.

- Abbas Souzian, Yerevan
- Photo credits: Mojtaba Mortazavi

Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents received the Golden Apricot in the International Full-Length Competition. The Switzerland-Argentina production centres on Lina, a 34-year-old Argentine stylist whose stable professional and personal life begins to shift after an award ceremony in Switzerland.

She returns to Buenos Aires without explaining what happened. As memories begin to reappear, the film moves through the quieter consequences of an experience Lina is unable, or unwilling, to put into words.

Iranian filmmakers Firouzeh Khosrovani and Morteza Ahmadvand received the Silver Apricot for Past Future Continuous, a documentary shaped by the distance between an exiled daughter and her ageing parents.

Maryam left Iran at the age of 20 after the 1979 revolution and has lived in the United States for many years. Yet the country she left behind remains present through family memories and her continued relationship with her parents in Tehran.

Cameras installed inside their home allow Maryam to observe their daily routines and stay close to them from another continent. The house becomes a shared space between Tehran and the United States, although internet shutdowns, the passage of time and her parents’ declining health repeatedly expose the limits of this connection.

Produced between Iran, Norway and Italy, the documentary uses technology not as a simple solution to separation, but as part of a complicated family relationship shaped by exile and ageing.

The international jury gave its Special Mention to London by Austrian director Sebastian Brameshuber. Despite its title, much of the film unfolds on the motorway between Vienna and Salzburg, where Bobby picks up strangers to share the cost of fuel.

Their conversations about employment, migration and family gradually form a portrait of contemporary European life. Brameshuber combines documentary encounters with constructed situations, leaving the boundary between observation and performance deliberately open.

Inside Amir Wins Golden Apricot in Regional Competition

Iranian cinema also led the Regional Competition, where Amir Azizi’s Inside Amir received the Golden Apricot.

Set in Tehran, the film observes a young man during the final days before his planned departure from Iran. Amir moves through the city by bicycle, meeting friends and revisiting familiar places as his decision to leave becomes increasingly real.

Rather than building the story around a single dramatic farewell, Azizi focuses on unfinished conversations, ordinary meetings and the emotional weight of separation. He wrote, directed and edited the film, with Amirhossein Hoseini in the central role.

Produced by Fog Films, Inside Amir previously appeared at Giornate degli Autori, the independent section held alongside the Venice Film Festival, where it received the GdA Director’s Award in 2025.

The Regional Competition’s Silver Apricot went to Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze for Dry Leaf. The film also received the FIPRESCI Prize from the International Federation of Film Critics.

Its story begins with the disappearance of Lisa, a photographer who had been documenting football fields in remote Georgian villages. She leaves a letter asking her parents not to search for her, but her father, Irakli, decides to retrace the route of her unfinished project.

He travels with Lisa’s friend Levani, an invisible presence in the film. Their movement across Georgia becomes less a conventional investigation than a journey through rural communities, landscapes and local football culture.

The double recognition for Dry Leaf placed Koberidze’s film among the most awarded works of the festival’s regional programme.

Armenian Shorts Receive Apricot Stone Awards

The Apricot Stone Competition, Golden Apricot’s section for short films, gave its main award to Dialogues Solitaires by Serouj Hovsepian. The France-Armenia production also received the Gennadi Melkonian Special Prize.

Set over one night in Paris, the film follows Aren as he considers telling his friend Van that he is in love with him. An encounter with a former lover brings older emotions back into the present and complicates his understanding of intimacy.

The Silver Apricot was awarded to Paid Mourners by Armenian writer-director Ovsanna Gevorgyan.

At the centre of the film is a family tradition carried by generations of women who work as professional mourners. Sixteen-year-old Margo, more interested in building an audience on TikTok, refuses to accept the role prepared for her.

Her grandmother’s announcement that she has only one week to live turns this disagreement into a confrontation between inheritance, performance and a younger generation’s desire to choose a different future.

The jury also gave Special Mentions to Sona Khachatryan’s Relic and Arthur Sahakyan’s Together Alone.

Relic centres on Minas, a blind 10-year-old boy whose supposed healing abilities lead to fear and rejection within his village. Together Alone looks back at the nearly five decades that Ofelya spent in isolation with her husband Shura, using their home and belongings as traces of a shared life.

Slovak filmmaker Tereza Nvotova’s Father received the Award for Distribution in Armenia and Georgia, supported by EUR 6,000. The drama examines the aftermath of a father’s tragic mistake and the pressure it places on his family, marriage and sense of responsibility.

Mahmoud Kalari Honoured With the Parajanov Thaler

The closing ceremony also recognised Iranian cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari with the Parajanov Thaler for his career and contribution to cinematography.

Kalari served as president of the Regional Competition jury during this year’s festival. Across a career of more than four decades, he has worked on over 60 films, including Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, Jafar Panahi’s Offside, Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila and Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us.

The Parajanov Thaler takes its name from the aluminium coins Sergei Parajanov made from milk-bottle lids while he was in prison. Golden Apricot presents a silver replica of one of these coins to artists recognised for their contribution to cinema.

Armenian-American producer Sev Ohanian also received the festival’s Master Award.

Golden Apricot 2026 concluded with a screening of Once Within a Time by American filmmaker Godfrey Reggio.

I would like to thank the entire Golden Apricot team for their work and effort in bringing this year’s festival together. It was a pleasure to be in Yerevan, follow the programme closely, and meet filmmakers and cinema professionals from Armenia and beyond.

- Abbas Souzian, Yerevan
- Photo credits: Mojtaba Mortazavi

At its centre is Hussein Darby, the last projectionist of Cinema Jenin in the West Bank. When a German NGO arrives to restore the abandoned cinema, Hussein hopes that more than 40 years of experience will allow him to return to his former position.

He travels through the West Bank looking for components for an old carbon-arc projector. His knowledge is physical and exact, built from years of handling film and machinery. Yet as the restoration moves forward, he appears to have less influence over the institution being rebuilt around him.

Bakri was part of the Cinema Jenin initiative and filmed the restoration process. In an interview published by Komplex Kulturmagazin on 9 July 2026, after the film screened at the International Film Festival Innsbruck, he said he had joined the project with positive intentions. Looking back, he identified an early problem: “nobody really asked the local people what they actually wanted or how they imagined the project.”

The footage had previously contributed to another film about the initiative. Bakri told the magazine that Hussein occupied only a small place in its first edited version, which did not match the story he believed he had witnessed. He returned to the material and rebuilt the film around Hussein.

A Golden Apricot Daily report by Yasmine Chan, published in Yerevan on 12 July, reads the documentary through the unequal relationship between international organisers and local workers. It points to Hussein’s uncertain employment prospects after his labour helped revive the projector. The report also quotes him describing Jenin as “only good for strangers,” where local people “can’t find their bread.”

The film does not ignore the hope created by the project. Bakri told Komplex Kulturmagazin that the work brought energy, volunteers and new friendships to Jenin for almost two years. His concern is that decisions and the public story of the restoration remained largely outside the community.

Hussein died before the documentary was completed, although Bakri said he had watched several edited sections. Cinema Jenin was later demolished and replaced by a shopping mall, leaving the film as a record of the building, its projectionist and the promises surrounding its return.

Habibi Hussein screened at the 23rd Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival. More information is available on the official festival film page.

Follow Souzian Dispatch for continued coverage of the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival.

The festival will take place from 12 to 19 July 2026 in Yerevan. This year's edition also arrives in a new industry context, after Golden Apricot joined FIAPF's accredited festival network in 2026. Its official programme brings together the Opening / Closing section, International Competition, Regional Panorama, Apricot Stone, Non-Competition, Retrospective and Tributes.

Golden Apricot 2026 begins with Tamara Stepanyan’s In The Land Of Arto, a France-Armenia production starring Camille Cottin, Zar Amir and Hovnatan Avédikian. The film follows a French woman who arrives in Armenia to legalize the death of her husband and gradually discovers the hidden parts of his past.

Zar Amir’s presence in the opening film gives the festival an immediate connection to Iranian cinema and diaspora performance. It also places the opening night inside a wider conversation about memory, displacement and artists working across borders.

The Opening / Closing section also includes Godfrey Reggio’s Once within a Time, which features Iranian artist Sussan Deyhim among its music and cast credits.

This first Souzian Dispatch report focuses mainly on films in the International Competition and Regional Panorama, where the strongest regional line of the programme appears. These sections include works linked to Iran, Armenia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Georgia, Lebanon, Egypt and North Africa.

Armenia

In The Land Of Arto

Director: Tamara Stepanyan
Production: France, Armenia
Section: Opening / Closing

Story:
Céline travels from France to Armenia to complete the legal process around the death of Arto, her husband. What begins as an administrative journey slowly opens into the parts of Arto’s life that he had kept from her.

The film moves through grief, war memory and the difficulty of saying goodbye to someone whose past remains only partly known. Its story is tied to the aftermath of the 2020 battles, where personal loss and national history remain close to each other.

Outliving Shakespeare

Directors: Inna Sahakyan, Ruben Ghazaryan
Production: Armenia, Netherlands
Section: International Competition

Story:
Inside a Soviet-era retirement home, elderly residents rehearse a play built around Shakespeare’s characters.

The rehearsals become part of daily life in the home. Through them, the film observes aging, loneliness, memory and the quiet forms of care that appear between residents.

Here, Elsewhere

Director: Comes Chahbazian
Production: Belgium, Armenia
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
During the 2023 siege of Artsakh, a family keeps filming its daily life as war comes closer.

The camera records ordinary gestures under pressure: waiting, listening, staying inside, trying to continue. The film looks at home as something fragile, held together by routine while danger remains nearby.

Iran

Past Future Continuous

Directors: Morteza Ahmadvand, Firouzeh Khosrovani
Production: Iran, Norway, Italy
Section: International Competition

Story:
Maryam left Iran at the age of twenty and never returned. Years later, cameras placed inside her family home in Tehran allow her to look back at the life she left behind.

The film turns distance into a way of seeing. Through family images, domestic space and remote presence, it reflects on exile, memory and the emotional weight of a home that remains out of reach.

Inside Amir

Director: Amir Azizi
Production: Iran
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
In Tehran, Amir is facing a decision that can change the direction of his life: whether to leave Iran.

The film stays close to his uncertainty rather than turning it into a larger statement. Through Amir’s hesitation, it captures the private pressure behind a question shared by many young Iranians today.

The Westoxicateds

Director: Gilda Pourjabar
Production: Canada, Iran
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Gilda Pourjabar returns to her teenage years in post-1979 Iran through the memory of forbidden rock music and bootleg cassettes.

The film follows a hidden youth culture shaped by listening, sharing and small acts of rebellion. Music becomes a way to remember a generation that searched for freedom through sounds that were not allowed to circulate openly.

An Incomplete Calendar

Director: Sanaz Sohrabi
Production: Canada, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
A little-known vinyl record made in 1980 for the anniversary of OPEC becomes the starting point for Sanaz Sohrabi’s film.

Through music and archive material, An Incomplete Calendar looks at oil, Palestine liberation and Pan-Arab solidarity during the 1960s and 1970s. The film follows the traces of political imagination left behind in sound.

Palestine

With Hasan In Gaza

Director: Kamal Aljafari
Production: Germany, Palestine, France, Qatar
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Kamal Aljafari works from MiniDV tapes shot in Gaza in 2001, recently rediscovered after years.

The images move through streets, faces and daily spaces that have since been deeply changed. The film becomes an act of looking again, using archive not as nostalgia, but as a record of a place and a life under threat.

Habibi Hussein

Director: Alex Bakri
Production: Palestine, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Sweden
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Hussein, a Palestinian projectionist in the West Bank, tries to repair an old cinema projector.

His work is small, physical and patient. Around it, the film builds a story about cinema as a public act, and about the desire to keep a screen alive where movement and gathering are never simple.

Afghanistan

No Good Men

Director: Shahrbanoo Sadat
Production: Germany, France, Norway, Denmark, Afghanistan
Section: International Competition

Story:
Kabul, 2021. Naru works as the only female cameraperson at the city’s main television station, while the Taliban’s return draws closer.

She is trying to protect her work, her child and the life she has built. Around her, public space begins to narrow, especially for women, and everyday choices become harder to separate from fear.

Georgia And The Caucasus

The Moon Is A Father Of Mine

Director: George Ovashvili
Production: Georgia, Germany, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Turkey
Section: International Competition

Story:
In Georgia after independence, twelve-year-old Toma lives in Tbilisi with his grandmother. His father, absent for years, suddenly returns.

The film places a family reunion inside a country still adjusting to political change. Toma’s home becomes a space where personal memory and national transition quietly meet.

A Fire There

Director: Marlene Edoyan
Production: Canada
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
In Gandzani, a remote village in southern Georgia near the Armenian border, an ethnic Armenian community lives close to several histories at once.

Marlene Edoyan’s film observes daily life in this border space, where language, memory and geography shape how people understand where they belong.

Dry Leaf

Director: Alexandre Koberidze
Production: Germany, Georgia
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Lisa disappears and leaves behind a letter asking others not to look for her. A search begins across Georgian villages.

The film moves through rural landscapes and the spaces left by absence. Its attention rests on movement, uncertainty and the quiet tension of looking for someone who may not want to be found.

Lebanon, Egypt And North Africa

Dream Of Another Summer

Director: Irene Bartolomé
Production: Spain, Lebanon
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
A woman’s physical and emotional collapse unfolds among urban ruins in Lebanon.

The film looks at the body and the city together. Broken spaces, memory and personal crisis become part of the same landscape.

Safe Exit

Director: Mohammed Hammad
Production: Egypt, Libya, Qatar, Tunisia, Germany
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Samaan, a young Coptic Christian security guard in Cairo, still carries the trauma of his father’s murder in Libya.

His life is pulled into a dangerous moral situation, where grief and survival begin to shape the choices available to him. The film moves through personal pain and social pressure in contemporary North Africa.

Apricot Stone

Golden Apricot’s Apricot Stone section presents Armenian short films in the 2026 programme.

This first Souzian Dispatch report does not enter the details of the short-film selection, but the section remains part of the festival’s wider structure and may be followed in later coverage.

Tributes

The Tributes section includes Bahram Beyzai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger and Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.

Beyzai’s restored Iranian classic follows Bashu, a ten-year-old boy from southern Iran whose village is bombed during the war. He hides in a truck and reaches the north of the country, where his skin, accent and language make him an outsider inside his own country. Its presence in the section adds an Iranian work about war, displacement and belonging to this year’s programme.

Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, based on the novel by László Krasznahorkai, follows the residents of a collapsing agricultural collective in a post-Communist landscape. Its inclusion places one of Tarr’s major works beside the festival’s wider conversation around history, collective life and social fracture.

Souzian Dispatch will follow selected films from the International Competition, Regional Panorama, Opening / Closing and Tributes sections as part of its Golden Apricot 2026 coverage.

If you are attending Golden Apricot in Yerevan, I would be happy to meet during the festival, exchange notes and hear about films, artists or events that deserve attention. You can follow Souzian Dispatch (@SouzianDispatch) and Abbas Souzian (@AbbasMHosseini) on Instagram for updates throughout the festival, and you are welcome to share suggestions, screening tips or story ideas.

For more updates on cinema and arts from the Middle East, follow me here.

The selection included Detention’s Ripple Effect: Why Inhumanity Breeds Hatred by Egyptian filmmaker Ahmad Mohammad Nady and The Notebook by Iranian directors Aghil Hosseinian and Sogol Sanagoo in the Commissioned Films section.

Winter in March by Armenian-born filmmaker Natalia Mirzoyan was selected for the Short Films Official competition. Annecy listed the film as a co-production between Armenia, Belgium, Estonia and France.

Annecy is one of the major international festivals dedicated to animation. Its programme includes short films, features, television works, commissioned films, graduation films and immersive projects from across the world.

According to the official Annecy 2026 awards list, none of these three works received an award at this year’s festival. The Cristal for a Commissioned Film went to Unloved, while the Jury Award for a Commissioned Film went to Eco Beat.

Detention’s Ripple Effect: Why Inhumanity Breeds Hatred

• Director: Ahmad Mohammad Nady

• Country of production: Egypt

• Section: Commissioned Films

• Running time: 40 seconds

Detention’s Ripple Effect: Why Inhumanity Breeds Hatred is a short commissioned animation from Egypt, directed by Ahmad Mohammad Nady.

The film was created in connection with the International Committee of the Red Cross and Nady Studio. It reflects on detention, torture and captivity, using visual metaphors to show the pain of people held in prisons and places of occupation.

The film presents the subject through a broader human perspective. It looks at how cruelty and the loss of dignity can create anger, trauma and hatred that continue beyond prison walls.

Nady Studio described the film as a cinematic vision of the pain of torture in detention and captivity, built through symbols and visual metaphors. Its selection for Annecy placed the work within an international platform dedicated to animation.

Ahmad Mohammad Nady is an Egyptian animation filmmaker and artist based in Cairo. His work moves between animation direction, concept art, storyboard, character design and studio-based production. He has also been connected with Nady Studio, an Egyptian animation and art production studio.

The Notebook

• Original title: Daftar yaddasht

• Directors: Aghil Hosseinian, Sogol Sanagoo

• Country of production: Iran

• Section: Commissioned Films

• Running time: 1 min 23 sec

• Techniques: Animated objects, clay, puppets

The Notebook is an Iranian commissioned animation directed by Aghil Hosseinian and Sogol Sanagoo.

The film is the title sequence for a series of the same name. Using handmade miniatures and stop-motion, it hides small visual clues that are connected to the story.

These clues refer to the story of a retired detective with Alzheimer’s who is searching for the killer of his parents. As the mystery unfolds, the title sequence becomes part of the series’ visual storytelling.

Annecy lists the film under the category of educational, scientific or industrial films. Its production and distribution are credited to Hossein Akbari and Filmnet, with music by Behnam Rad. The script is credited to Sogol Sanagoo and Aghil Hosseinian.

Its selection places an Iranian stop-motion title sequence alongside international commissioned works, including advertising films, music videos, festival trailers and campaign works.

Winter in March

• Director: Natalia Mirzoyan

• Countries of production: Armenia, Belgium, Estonia, France

• Year of production: 2025

• Section: Short Films Official

• Running time: 16 min 22 sec

Winter in March is a stop-motion animated short by Natalia Mirzoyan, an Armenian-born animation director and artist based in Estonia.

The film follows a young couple who wake up to news of war and repression. What begins as a quiet domestic moment slowly turns into a surreal nightmare, as images of violence, fear and collapse enter their home and push them toward escape.

The story is rooted in March 2022 and in the experience of people leaving Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Mirzoyan has described the film as an animadoc based on several hours of interviews with her friends Kirill and Dasha, both part of the St. Petersburg artistic and intellectual world.

The film combines documentary material with a handmade visual language. It uses puppets, fabric textures and cotton-like snow to build a visual world around fear, guilt, helplessness and displacement.

Winter in March also connects with Mirzoyan’s own life. Born in Yerevan to a Jewish-Armenian family, she later moved to St. Petersburg to study art and worked with Studio Peterburg. After returning to St. Petersburg in early 2022, she and her family were forced to leave Russia after the beginning of the war.

The film premiered in La Cinef at the Festival de Cannes in 2025, where it won the 3rd Prize ex aequo. It later received the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Short Film and the Grand Prix at Feinaki Beijing Animation Week 2025.

Winter in March was also selected by Uppsala Short Film Festival as a candidate for the European Film Awards 2027 short film category. Its selection in Annecy’s official short film competition continued the film’s international festival run.

For more updates on cinema and arts from the Middle East, follow me here.

The film, internationally titled Pieces of a Foreign Life, opened in French cinemas on 24 June 2026 through Tandem Films. It previously competed at Bergamo Film Meeting 2026.

The film follows Selma, a Syrian woman who flees the war, leaving behind her young son and her husband, who has disappeared into the prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s former regime.

After arriving in Bordeaux, Selma works illegally while trying to secure asylum and find a way to bring her son, Rami, to France. Her life changes when she meets Jérôme, a lawyer who helps her with her case. Their relationship slowly becomes something deeper, and it begins to unsettle the life she is trying to rebuild.

Gaya Jiji has said she wanted to approach immigration through intimacy and melodrama, rather than through a direct social drama. For Gaya Jiji, the film is also about the idea that love can become a kind of homeland.

The connection between Gaya Jiji and Zar Amir is also personal. Both women were forced to leave their countries, and Gaya Jiji has said this shared experience shaped their work on Selma. She had spent years searching for the right actress for the role before seeing Zar Amir in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider.

Zar Amir plays Selma as a woman carrying grief, fear and resistance in her body. The character is often treated as invisible, both by French society and by parts of the Syrian community around her. In Gaya Jiji’s view, Jérôme’s recognition of Selma’s courage is what allows her to be seen.

Pieces of a Foreign Life is a France-Belgium production, written by Gaya Jiji, Sarah Angelini, Agnès Feuvre and Mehdi Ben Attia. The cast also includes Alexis Manenti as Jérôme, Amr Waked as Yasser, Megan Northam as Claire, and Grégoire Monsaingeon as Markus.

The film runs 101 minutes and is produced by Gloria Films Production, TS Productions, France 3 Cinéma and Panache Productions. International sales are handled by France tv Distribution.

Zar Amir , who won Best Actress at Cannes in 2022 for Holy Spider, has continued to work across European and international cinema. She also appeared in Two People Exchanging Saliva, which won the 2026 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in a rare tie with The Singers.

Gaya Jiji is now writing a new project that will form part of a trilogy with her debut feature “My Favourite Fabric” and “Pieces of a Foreign Life”. The new film looks toward childhood, nostalgia and the question of dreaming in a country shaped by dictatorship.

For more updates on cinema and arts from the Middle East, follow me here.

Yassine El Idrissi won Best Director for Halima, and Khadija Amari won Best Actress for her role in the film. In the screenplay category, Reis Çelik won Best Screenplay for Night of Blindness.

The Shanghai International Film Festival has been held since 1993. It is considered one of the most important cinema events in Asia. Its main competition section, the Golden Goblet Awards, honors films, directors, actors, and emerging talents from world cinema.

Halima

Winner of Best Director and Best Actress
Director: Yassine El Idrissi
Country: Morocco
Premiere status: World Premiere

The film, which marks Morocco’s return to the Shanghai International Film Festival after 27 years, had its world premiere at the festival.

Halima follows an elderly woman living a quiet life by the sea. Her calm world is suddenly disturbed by an unexpected phone call, which connects the present to a past she had buried deep in her memory.

The call begins the film’s movement between the present day and five years earlier, forcing Halima to confront a past shaped by the illegal cannabis trade. The film also portrays her effort to protect her home.

Yassine El Idrissi, a Moroccan director and screenwriter, worked as a photojournalist before entering cinema. Through his travels across Morocco, he met many different people. The character of Halima reflects those who live on the margins of society, but continue to face life’s hardships with courage.

El Idrissi’s ability to portray such a character earned him the Best Director award at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival. He studied at the Netherlands Film Academy and has directed short films and documentaries on themes such as freedom, dignity, and belonging. His earlier works have been screened at international film festivals.

Khadija Amari, the lead actress of the film, also won the festival’s Best Actress award. Previously known mostly for smaller roles in Moroccan cinema, and without a leading role in a feature film before this, Amari received one of the festival’s main acting honors for her performance in Halima.

Night of Blindness

Winner of Best Screenplay
Director: Reis Çelik
Countries: Turkey, Germany
Premiere status: World Premiere

Directed by Reis Çelik, Night of Blindness is a Turkey-Germany co-production that had its world premiere at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

The film is a tense drama shot entirely in black and white. According to Çelik, this visual choice helped hide the emotional core of the story.

The story takes place during Turkey’s 1980 military coup. It follows Fatma, a political activist who, while trying to avoid arrest, is forced to trust a group of unknown workers inside the suffocating atmosphere of an unfinished building.

Night of Blindness is the second part of Reis Çelik’s Night Trilogy. The first film in the trilogy, Night of Silence, was made in 2012.

Turkish director Reis Çelik began his professional career as a journalist at the newspaper Dünya after graduation. He later worked for more than ten years at Günaydın.

During his career, Çelik has directed many commercials and 12 documentaries. His long professional experience also contributed to Night of Blindness receiving the Best Screenplay award at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival.

The call is open online through Picter from 21 May to 24 September 2026, closing at 11:59 PM CEST. Submissions are free.

MENA Panorama is part of PhotoVogue’s wider series of regional open calls. It follows previous initiatives focused on Italy, Latin America, and East and Southeast Asia.

This new edition turns to the Middle East and North Africa at a time when images from the region are often shaped by conflict, displacement, social change, and outside narratives. The open call invites artists to present their own visual language, whether through personal stories, collective memory, identity, fashion, documentary work, portraiture, fine art, or experimental practices.

The call is open to artists aged 18 and above. Applicants may submit photography, video, or multimedia projects across all genres.

Each submission can include a series of up to 15 images, or a combination of images and video for multimedia projects. Artists may also submit a 60-second video trailer.

AI-generated works are not accepted.

A total of $8,000 will be awarded to three artists. The Outstanding Vision Grant is worth $4,500 and is intended for an artist whose work expands creative boundaries. The Vision Grant is worth $2,000 and will go to an artist with a distinctive perspective and strong visual voice. The Rising Voice Grant is worth $1,500 and is aimed at an emerging artist whose work shows originality and potential.

Beyond the cash grants, selected artists may be featured at the 2027 PhotoVogue Festival. Their work may also be published across Condé Nast titles in the region, including Vogue, GQ, Architectural Digest, and Condé Nast Traveler. Selected artists will also be invited to take part in PhotoVogue Virtual Portfolio Reviews.

The jury brings together figures from Condé Nast and the wider MENA creative scene, including artists, curators, photographers, editors, and cultural professionals.

The announced jury includes Afef Jnifen, Aidan Imanova, Alessia Glaviano, Amine Jreissati, Azu Nwagbogu, Carla Sertin, Doğukan Nesanir, Elyanna, Haifaa al-Mansour, Hoor Al Qasimi, Keanoush Zargham, Khalifa Al Obaidly, Manuel Arnaut, Meriem Bennani, Mohamad Abdouni, Mohamed Somji, Newsha Tavakolian, Nora Attal, Reem Fadda, Samira Larouci, Selina Denman, Shadi Ghadirian, and Thomas Khoury.

Among them are several major cultural voices from the region, including Saudi filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour, Sharjah Art Foundation President and Director Hoor Al Qasimi, Iranian photographer and artist Newsha Tavakolian, and Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian.

According to the terms of the open call, artists retain full copyright of their work. By submitting, they grant Condé Nast a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to publish, reproduce, and distribute submitted materials on PhotoVogue platforms, across Condé Nast print and digital publications, and in relation to the promotion and presentation of the open call.

The terms also state that submission does not guarantee selection, publication, or exhibition.

For artists working from or around the Middle East and North Africa, MENA Panorama offers more than a grant. It places regional image-making inside an international editorial and festival network, while asking artists to speak from their own position rather than fit into a single image of the region.

• Deadline for submissions: 24 September 2026, 11:59 PM CEST

• Contact: daniel.rodriguez-gordillo@condenast.es

• Official information:
  https://www.vogue.com/article/mena-panorama-a-regional-open-call-by-photovogue

• Submission page:
  https://site.picter.com/photovogue-regional-open-call-mena-panorama-2026

For more updates on cinema and arts from the Middle East, follow me here.

Jihan looks for a father who vanished when she was six years old, while also trying to understand the Libya that shaped his life, his disappearance, and her own sense of belonging.

I spoke with Jihan online from Istanbul, while she joined from New York City. Our conversation took place on the occasion of her film’s screening at Hot Docs Festival in Toronto and New York African Film Festival at the Lincoln Center.

Her father, Mansur Rashid Kikhia, was a Libyan human rights lawyer, former foreign minister, UN Ambassador, and later a respected opposition figure against Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. He was also known for his ability to speak across political lines and bring people into conversation at a time when Libya’s opposition was divided. He disappeared in Cairo in 1993.

In the film, Jihan brings together family videos, historical archives, interviews, and the presence of her Syrian mother, Baha Al Omary. Through these materials, the film moves from a family story toward Libya’s recent history, and toward a country often seen through the name of Qaddafi.

In our conversation, we spoke about memory, archives, her mother, and the long work of bringing a missing father back into view.

Abbas: Hello Ms. Jihan, thank you so much for accepting my invitation for this interview. I am very happy we can have this conversation.

Yesterday I posted a short note in Persian and said that I was going to speak with the daughter of Mansur Rashid Kikhia. I also explained who your father was. To my surprise, almost 12,000 people saw it and many reacted to it.

I really did not expect so many Iranians to know about your father. It made me feel that this story can travel beyond Libya, and that people in our region may connect with it in a very personal way.

Jihan: That is beautiful. My hope is for my film to be shared in many languages and with many cultures around the world. So it would be a gift to have Iranian people connecting with my family’s story.

On The Film’s Perspective And The Image Of The Father

Abbas: When I first saw the title of the film, I thought it would be a political story about someone whose father had a conflict with Qaddafi. But when the film began and you said, “my father,” I understood how personal it was.

What stayed with me is that the film is deeply personal, but you also keep a certain distance. You look at your father as a daughter, but also as someone trying to understand his place in Libya’s history. How did you find this balance?

Jihan: I was raised with this balance. The project came from my heart - from an overwhelming desire to discover my father and myself. It is a search for truth. And it is a search through the lens of understanding and healing. So non-judgment.

I used the film as a way to transition from a passive young girl into a proactive woman who has agency. I am piecing together a puzzle - a portrait of my father. And in order to create a portrait of my father, I need the context of Libya’s history.

And one of the goals, besides my own personal resolve, is to share a story with the world about Libya through a more human and empathetic lens, and to liberate our identity beyond Qaddafi’s monopoly.

The Moment Of Deciding To Make The Film

Abbas: How many years did it take to make the film? And when did the idea really begin for you? Was there a clear moment when you felt that your father’s story should become a film?

Jihan: The film took 9 years to make. When my father was buried on December 3rd, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, about one month later, the transitional government, the post-Qaddafi government, collapsed and the country descended into a 6-7 year civil war. So Libya again became inaccessible and dangerous.

As I was waiting for the country to stabilize I realised that my father might disappear a second time - that Libya might disappear and that the country may not have the infrastructure, or the capacity to remember my father. So instead of waiting for the truth to come to me, I had to seek the truth myself. So I decided to tell my father’s story and I chose film as the medium.

I was living in New York City, near my mother, and noticed that she became a little bit more delicate, a little bit older. And this also increased the stakes.

I believed that if my mother disappeared, then all our family stories would disappear with her. My mother was there on the front line searching for my father. She was always my main source of truth.

About The Mother And The Pain Of Hope

Abbas: There is something very painful in the way Qaddafi’s regime kept your family in uncertainty, especially through the hope of finding your father. I wanted to ask about your mother, Baha Al Omary.

In the film, she is not only a mother. She is also a wife searching for her husband, a woman carrying a long and painful search, and someone who had to protect her children at the same time. How do you see her place in this story?

Jihan: My family was trapped in a prison of hope. And Qaddafi’s regime manipulated that. But when I started making my film, I decided to humanize everybody, because I can’t play God and decide who I humanize and who I don’t. I felt that to complete my mission it was more important to learn and understand than to judge.

I was six years old when my father disappeared and I was 25 when his body was found. My mother invested in our joy and nurtured our innocence. By the time I was 25, I had lived a happy life alongside the trauma. One of the pillars of our family was that my mother told us the truth, and this was empowering and liberating. The effort I’ve put into my film and to share the story about my father is not only a small act of justice but it also comes from a place of loving life and believing in joy and hope in spite of our suffering.

The Mother’s Honesty And The Father’s Memory

Abbas: There is a moment in the film when you say, “I don’t remember my father.” Your voice in that moment felt very honest and very real to me.

I did not feel that you were trying to create a fantasy around him. I felt you were trying to face the truth, even when the truth was painful. Do you think your mother’s honesty helped you approach your father in this way?

Jihan: Yes, my mother kept my father alive through stories. She is an artist—creative, expressive, full of color, music, vitality, and a sharp sense of humor—and she metaphorically painted a semi-abstract version of him for us to grow up with. But she never made my father inaccessible. She spoke honestly about his humanity, his flaws, their disagreements, and the way they challenged each other. She made sure he stayed human.

I lost him when I was six, at an age where memory itself already feels unstable. I think so much of childhood is filled in later by stories, by imagination and beliefs. So my father exists for me somewhere between memory and dream, trapped in this surreal space.

That loss created a duality in me: I feel grounded in reality, but I also carry this constant surreal feeling, like part of me is still living inside the shock of that rupture. Storytelling, poetry, and music—these became ways of reaching beyond the practical world, ways of connecting broken lines and crossing emotional distances. Through this film, I could create an imaginary space where all those fragments could finally meet again.

The Ghost Of Dictators

Abbas: In some of the interviews in the film, I felt that people still find it difficult to speak. The political system has changed, but fear seems to remain. The dictator is gone, but something of him is still there. How do you understand this fear?

Jihan: One of my interviewees said “the ghost of Qaddafi is still ruling us”. Another interviewee said, “At least there was one dictator. Now we have thousands of dictators.” When there is only one person to blame, the world seems deceivingly simple and clear. But when that person is gone, and your long awaited freedom disappears into an illusion – you are left with an overwhelming dilemma. I think that kind of heartbreak could break you. That loss is why I filmed an older generation of Libyan men reflecting on their lives. Many of them are the same age as my father. My father would have been 95 years old if he was alive today. I wanted to give space for that heartbreak, and in some small way, to help heal it. They were devastated to spend over 50 years hoping things would get better, only to reach the other side and barely recognize their own country and people. That is a lot for any human being to carry in a lifetime. It’s also why I kept asking about the older generations’ childhoods—about the lives they lived before Qaddafi came to power. Their memories of those years in Libya are a treasure. This film is my small act of resistance—one story that revives a memory, connects it to today, and offers a little hope and light.

The Film Archive

Abbas: The archive in the film is very powerful: the historical footage, the family videos, the voices, the old images, the interviews. It feels like the film is not only searching for your father, but also trying to imagine Libya again. Can you tell me about your work with the archive? What did it give you, and what was difficult about it?

Jihan: I didn’t grow up seeing Libya represented from a Libyan perspective. It wasn’t in the media, and there wasn’t much popular history or cultural content that allowed me to imagine the country beyond Qaddafi’s suffocating grip. That was a big motivation for me. I wanted to separate my Libyan identity from a single political figure and create space to see its history and culture - to connect with the people on my own terms. That’s why I was so committed to using real archival material. I didn’t want shortcuts or reenactments. If I talk about a moment in history, I wanted audiences to see the real images from that time. The archives were a way to help me, and the audience, imagine - or reimagine - Libya.

The archival aspect was also deeply personal. I’ve been preserving my family’s photos, videos, and recordings since I was a child, so in some ways this film feels like the culmination of a lifetime of collecting and protecting memories. When I decided to make the film, I realized I already had real footage of my family and our search for our father. That raw material became central to the project. It is very much a family film— my sister, Bisan Toron, is a vocalist and we play her music in the film, including the closing song dedicated to our father. The film is a product of a tool that my mother gifted us growing up: that creative expression can liberate us and help us make sense of difficult realities, preserve truth, and find our own voice no matter what challenges we face.

I would like to thank Jihan for taking the time to speak with Souzian Dispatch. With this interview, Souzian Dispatch concludes its coverage of Hot Docs 2026. My Father and Qaddafi screened twice at Hot Docs 2026 in Toronto: on Friday, May 1 at 8:15 PM at TLB 1, and on Saturday, May 2 at 11:45 AM at TLB 2.

• More About The Film:
  Visit the film’s official website: myfatherandqaddafi.com.
  Visit the film’s page on Instagram: @myfatherandqaddafi

• Festival Journey And Awards:
  The film’s official website lists its world premiere at La Biennale di Venezia, followed by screenings at festivals including Chicago International Film Festival, Doha Film Festival, Marrakech International Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Movies That Matter, Hot Docs, Sydney Film Festival, and others.

• Selected Awards:
  The film has received several awards, including the Jury Prize at Marrakech International Film Festival, Best Documentary at Doha Film Festival, Audience Award at CinemaMed in Brussels, and the Valentina Pedicini Award at MedFilm Festival Rome.

Set in the Iranian desert, the film follows an elderly man living with his wife as he faces bodily decline, emotional distance, and the nearness of death. In search of solace, and perhaps a way back to his past, he returns to a handmade cave, a place somewhere between home, memory, and land.

Without dialogue, Faraz Fadaian builds the film through image, silence, sound, and the rhythm of daily life. In this conversation, he speaks about the making of LandStone, meeting the elderly man and his wife, the choice of silence and black and white, the role of sound and music, and working with his father, the filmmaker Farshad Fadaian, on the edit.

The Making of LandStone

Abbas: To begin, I would like to ask about the moment the film started to take shape. How did you meet this elderly man and his wife, and what was it in their daily life that made you feel this world could become LandStone?

The old man in the film seems to live between two spaces: the house and the cave. How did you understand this movement between shelter, memory, loneliness, and the past?

Faraz: When my first film, The Last Breath, and my second film, Luckless Lake, were finished, I wanted to make a third film that could perhaps become part of a trilogy about Iran’s dry water basins. For the first film, I went back and forth for ten years. It was a kind of classroom for me. The second film took two years. After Lake Urmia and Bakhtegan wetland, I wanted to go to Khuzestan, to Hoor al-Azim. Gavkhouni no longer had any life on the map. Jazmourian had been forgotten for decades, and Parishan was more troubled than ever. My father had worked on Khuzestan for years. Hours of flying over that unique geographic horizon. The further I moved forward, the less willing I became to do the work.

Khuzestan had been off-limits. Making a film there was considered an unpleasant activity. I let it go. Then I came across a phenomenon called “Bukan”. Bukan is the same as bum-kand, something dug into the earth. It was a deprived phenomenon. Even in written history, I could find almost nothing beyond a small mention. Bukan had been forgotten, and shepherds had turned to concrete rooms instead. It was in ruins, its corridors collapsed. Only two half-alive ones remained, along with an old man who owned it. I met the old man - the same old man from the film. He was fighting three cancers. His medication was hard to find. I said maybe I could help. He said, if you come back, I’ll move my sheep from the storeroom back into the heart of Boken. I said, you mean you’ll go back to the plain? He said, Ha! I said, then I’ll make your film.

Trust And Closeness To The Characters

Abbas: Trust is very important in a film like this, because the camera enters silences and private moments of life. What path did you take to reach this closeness with them?

Faraz: Altogether, I saw the old man twice. He showed me the area. He told me about his dreams. Maybe out of loneliness, he just wanted to talk. He played music for me. When you go to an old man deep in the desert, who doesn’t even get a visitor at his home once a year, it’s not unlikely that he’ll welcome your presence. But he was sharp. His wife was kind and gentle too. Until the last day of filming, I rarely spoke with her.

The Production Path

Abbas: During production, how much did LandStone feel like a solitary and personal project for you? Did it have a specific festival destination or producer from the beginning, or did that path take shape after the film was made?

Faraz: During the production of this film, only my father was beside me. The film was not made for any specific place or with any clear goal. After the film was made, the producer showed interest.

Abbas: The film has no dialogue. When did you reach the decision that image, sound, and silence were enough to carry the film? Do you feel you lost anything by removing dialogue, and what did you gain?

Faraz: I did not lose anything. This silence was the sound of that house, the plain, and the Bukan. When you leave the city, people do not have anything to say. Gradually, they forget words. Silence becomes part of the reality of the place.

Black And White Image

Abbas: The black and white image gives the film a very physical feeling: stone, skin, dust, shadow, and erosion. Why did you choose black and white, and what did this choice reveal to you that color could not?

Faraz: My rushes were all shot in color, and when the title “LandStone” was chosen, the film lost color to black and white. Because of all the things you just mentioned.

The Rhythm Of Life And Editing

Abbas: The rhythm of the film is built on repetition, waiting, and small everyday gestures. How did you decide when the camera should stay with a moment, and when it should move away?

Faraz: The filming period was nine days. The old man intended to take the flock back to the plain and the Bukan with the first rain. On the eleventh day, it rained. Everything was moving in its place. I was following events. The night before leaving, the old man, who rarely used the bath, washed his hair and beard. The order of taking pills mattered to me. The well of the house was dry, and the pump could not bring the water up. The old man said he had once been the shepherd of seven hundred sheep, and now only thirty or forty remained. His hope was in the plain. Eating food was no different from taking medicine. I was following the old man. The rhythm of the film was the speed of that life. This rhythm took shape in the edit.

Abbas: You have a background in photography and visual work. In LandStone, when you looked at a landscape, a body, or an interior space, were you thinking more like a photographer or like a filmmaker?

Faraz: I do not know what to say. Obsession with the frame is not a unique quality. What matters is that you frame the image according to reality.

The Sound World Of LandStone

Abbas: Sound plays a very important role in the film: wind, the silence of the house, the sound of the body, footsteps, and empty space. How did you build the sound world of LandStone?

Faraz: Sound has a special importance for me. I remember my father always used Bresson as an example for me - how sound can replace image. In LandStone, everything is cracking. A pill and a pomegranate seed make the same noise. Everything has turned to stone and crunches. The old man cannot even comb his hair. The animals’ feed is dry almond skin, and the noise of the mine constantly fills the corridors of Bukan. I didn’t design anything. Maybe I only listened carefully.

Abbas: Ali Choolaei’s music in the film is minimal but precise. How did you decide where music should enter, and where silence should remain complete?

Faraz: Music appears in three places. The beginning, the end, and somewhere in the middle, where we see images of cut and dried tree trunks. The nature of the music is also from the nature of LandStone. The bows are played harshly. During filming, I met a musician from Brazil, Daniela Mars, who played Contrabass flute and Bass flute . I sent a message, we got in touch, and she was interested in letting me use one of her pieces. The piece felt like the sound of a breath trying to remain, and that was exactly what I wanted. In the end, the recording studio sent the license for the music too late, and that is why I contacted Ali. Although my initial idea was more about the sound of breath, what Ali wrote sat correctly on the film. The music at the beginning of the film is itself part of the process of turning into stone. At the end, the music worked better than silence or ambient sound. For the old man’s sleep, the music was also the entrance of that stone-like state into him.

Iranian Cinema and Sohrab Shahid Saless

Abbas: Your film reminded me of the atmosphere of Sohrab Shahid Saless’s Still Life, especially in its attention to time, silence, and the lives of people who are often seen on the margins. Has this film, or that kind of gaze in Iranian cinema, been an inspiration for you?

Faraz: I have been my father’s assistant in making his films for more than fifteen years. During all these years, my father always went toward people whom no one paid attention to, toward people and houses. These people did not necessarily have special abilities. They were not even living in special conditions. They were simply ordinary people, in even simpler conditions, away from the noise and the asphalt jungles. Perhaps more than anything, I have understood my father’s gaze toward the matter of how people live. People in their relations with their surroundings. I love Sohrab Shahid Saless and his cinema very much, but I cannot say that I developed an idea under the influence of such a world. Of course, all of us are undoubtedly influenced by everything we encounter in life.

Editing, Father, And The Ethics Of Filmmaking

Abbas: The film was edited by your father, Farshad Fadaian. We know him and his artistic background well. How did your conversations in the editing room unfold? What did his presence add to the rhythm and final gaze of the film? And more broadly, how has your father influenced your work artistically?

Faraz: I learned cinema and image from my father, and this process of learning continues to this day. But that doesn’t mean we agree on everything. This project was no exception. Even though the amount of footage shot was very small compared to the final running time, the editing took several weeks. My relationship with my father is that of father-son, colleague, brother, and even closest friend. At the editing table, this relationship goes beyond the usual father-son conventions. So any suggestion or idea I bring up has to be solid - has to hold water - for him to accept it. Farshad Fadaian knows editing and cinema well, and for him, getting the work ‘right’ is more important than anything else. My father has edited all three of my feature films, and even the dozens of short films I made as exercises - even the ones where he himself is the subject - I always finalize with him in the end. I think editing, especially in documentary cinema, is everything. There is always a gap between your images and your ideas; proper editing bridges that gap.

Undoubtedly, my path is separate from my father’s, because I look at the world in a different way. But what will remain is the commitment to ethics in filmmaking that I have been learning from my father throughout all these years. It is not something easy to obtain.

I would like to thank Faraz Fadaian for taking the time to speak with me about LandStone.

The film screened at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2026 in Toronto, held from April 23 to May 3, 2026.

LandStone was shown twice at the festival: on Saturday, April 25, 2026, at 17:00 in TLB 4, and on Sunday, April 26, 2026, at 10:00 in TLB 3.

You can follow Faraz Fadaian on Instagram: @farazfadaian

In this conversation, we spoke about how FIPRESCI works, the challenges of reaching Cannes, the atmosphere of the festival from a juror’s point of view, and his personal path from independent film discussion sessions to filmmaking.

The conversation took place online, with me in Istanbul and Pouya in Vicenza, Italy.

What FIPRESCI Means Beyond The Prize

Abbas: To begin, maybe it is better to start with FIPRESCI itself. For many of our readers, it may not be fully clear what FIPRESCI is, how it works, and what kind of position it has in the film world. How would you define it?

Pouya: The simplest definition is the International Federation of Film Critics. Last year, it celebrated its 100th anniversary.

But if I want to talk about what it does, I think the most important thing is that it creates a real community of critics. It brings together critics from different countries, and the most important place where you can bring these people together is film festivals.

From the early years, FIPRESCI had a strong presence in Cannes. Critics would come, watch films, discuss them, and finally announce which film they believed deserved the prize.

Abbas: And of course, this prize is more about prestige than money, right?

Pouya: Yes. It is usually given as a plaque or a diploma, but it is very important for the film itself.

Later, during distribution and promotion, the filmmaker can proudly use the title of “winner of the international critics’ prize.” Now that there are more festivals, FIPRESCI is also present in many important festivals around the world.

Recently, I also feel that it has become a little more active. For example, it is paying more attention to new generations of critics, or to the question of how criticism can stay alive in today’s world.

Abbas: How did the membership path work for you, especially because we do not have an office or representation in Iran?

Pouya: That is exactly where the main challenge is. FIPRESCI has offices in many countries, and critics’ applications are reviewed through those offices.

But because Iran does not have an office, we have to apply individually. At the moment, there are five Iranian members: Hamed Soleimanzadeh, Azadeh Jafari, Amir Ata Julayi, Bijan Tehrani, and me. Each of us lives in a different part of the world. I am the only member living in Iran.

Abbas: At some point, your international path as a critic and writer also became more serious. Where did that first spark come from?

Pouya: For me, the turning point was writing about Bardo, the film by Iñárritu. I saw it at the Busan Film Festival, and I felt that many people, even some of Iñárritu’s own fans, had not taken it very seriously.

But for me, when a filmmaker goes toward memory, lies, and his own personal world with that level of honesty, it is very valuable. It reminded me of what Fellini did in 8½.

The text I wrote about that film was published in Busan Beat and a few other platforms, and it opened a new path for me.

Now in Iran, I mostly work with Film Emrooz. Outside Iran, I have written for the FIPRESCI website and outlets such as High on Films.

The Long Road From Iran To Cannes

Abbas: And after that, you reached jury work at festivals like DMZ and Bangalore, although in the case of Bangalore, the visa challenge came up.

Pouya: Yes. After my jury experience at DMZ, which went very well, I was selected for Bangalore in India.

For many people, traveling to India may not be very complicated. But when you have an Iranian passport, everything can suddenly become difficult.

Even though I had been selected, I could not go in the end because of the visa problem. After that, the Cannes story happened.

Abbas: How did you receive the news that you were selected for Cannes? I imagine, after what happened with India, you were both happy and worried.

Pouya: The process was really strange. In March 2026, I received an email saying that I had been selected for the FIPRESCI jury in Cannes.

At first, I was very happy. But immediately after that, the visa worry came. It was not only about having an invitation letter. I had to get a visa at a time when the situation in Iran was not stable at all. The internet had problems, and administrative processes had become very complicated.

Abbas: This part of the story is usually hidden behind official news.

Pouya: Exactly. From the outside, people only see a headline saying, “This person became a Cannes juror.” But they do not know what story is behind it.

The embassy wanted strong financial documents from me, and foreign support was not enough for them. I had to prove that I had financial backing in Iran.

My family, and especially my grandmother, helped me a lot there. Without her support, maybe the whole trip would have been cancelled.

Until the last moment, it was not clear whether I would be able to go or not. FIPRESCI itself also followed up a lot to help the process reach a result.

Abbas: And finally you made it. How was the atmosphere of the festival from the point of view of a juror, beyond the usual glamour of the red carpet?

Pouya: Cannes is really another world. The glamour you see from outside truly exists. The city, the parties, the red carpet, everything has a special energy.

But when you are there as a juror, everything changes for you. The red carpet becomes only a small part of the story.

The main thing is the responsibility you have. You have to watch the films, analyze them, discuss them with the other jurors, and reach a conclusion.

In fact, you enter a big cinematic system.

Inside Un Certain Regard

Abbas: You were in the jury group for Un Certain Regard. Are first-time jurors usually placed directly in this section?

Pouya: Not necessarily. In fact, jurors who are there for the first time are often placed in parallel sections like Directors’ Fortnight or Critics’ Week.

That is why it was very exciting for me to be placed directly in Un Certain Regard. I think this happened because of the good feedback they had received from my jury work at DMZ.

The two other jurors in my group were also very experienced. One of them was French and wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma. I think it was his 25th year attending Cannes.

Abbas: For readers who may not know the structure of Cannes very well, what is the difference between Un Certain Regard and the main competition?

Pouya: The main competition is usually the place for fully established and well-known filmmakers.

Un Certain Regard, as its name suggests, is more dedicated to first and second films, fresh worlds, and directors who may not yet have a wide reputation, but have bold ideas.

Being selected for this section can completely change the future path of a filmmaker.

Looking For New Voices, Not Perfect Films

Abbas: Among the films in this year’s section, did you notice any repeating motif or pattern? Something that could be seen as a current or a shared direction?

Pouya: Yes. One thing that was very strong for me was the presence of young women who were moving toward a kind of inner independence.

I do not want to simplify it too much, but in several films this theme was visible: a young woman, in a stage of moving away from the past, family, or society, and trying to reach herself.

I do not mean economic or social independence only. I mean more of an emotional and intellectual maturity, a way of leaving a dependent state.

Abbas: And cinematically, how was it? Were the films’ executions as strong as their ideas?

Pouya: To be honest, in many of the films, the synopsis and the first idea were ahead of what we actually saw on the screen.

The idea was excellent, but there were weaknesses in the execution. Sometimes the découpage or the camera placement was not precise. But at the same time, you could feel that there was a serious and deep perspective behind the film.

In judging a section like this, you are not only looking for a perfect film. You also have to see whether this filmmaker has a future and deserves support.

Abbas: In the end, the FIPRESCI Prize in your section went to Ben’Imana. What convinced you about this film?

Pouya: Ben’Imana did not keep heavy ideas like judgment, forgiveness, and the wounds of the past only on a large social level.

The film begins with a courtroom situation and the question of forgiveness. But later, very intelligently, it brings this crisis into the personal life of the same woman who says in court, “I forgive.”

The film shows that these ideas do not only belong to history or the courtroom. They also exist at home, and in our relationship with our children.

From Independent Screenings To Filmmaking

Abbas: With this analytical experience in Cannes, if we go back to your own career, where did criticism begin for you? I remember you were very active in independent spaces.

Pouya: Yes. I started fully independently around 2016. I would screen films in small theaters and cultural spaces, and afterward we would talk and analyze them with the audience.

My connection with the audience was very direct. I even held programs in other cities, like Shiraz.

Then Covid changed many things. I had made the short film Lightroom, which was shown in Poland, at On Art, and in a few other places. But because of Covid, I could not travel with the film to festivals the way I wanted.

Still, something important happened for me. In the first year of the pandemic, I went to Gorgan and spent about a year editing a series.

Editing in a situation where you do not have a complete script and there is no script supervisor teaches you a lot. You have to understand from the rushes themselves what the film wants to say.

That experience deeply affected the way I look at filmmaking.

Abbas: Are you currently working on a feature screenplay as well? Projects like Blind Watcher, which reached the Sundance shortlist, or the screenplay you mentioned that is ready to be made?

Pouya: Yes. I have been planning to make my first feature film for a long time.

A few times, I came very close to production. But in Iran, conditions can suddenly change in a way that changes all your plans.

At the moment, I have a completed screenplay called The Season of Flying Bubbles. The story takes place in a school. I have also made a short demo for it, and I am very interested in starting this project.

Abbas: If you want to sum up the whole experience of serving as a jury member in Cannes, what would you say?

Pouya: For me, it means that people from different cultures and different worlds, with all their disagreements, can sit together and reach a shared choice about cinema.

This experience proved to me that criticism is still alive. It can still take a perspective seriously. It can still affect the way a film is seen.

Abbas: You have followed a very interesting path, from independent sessions in small theaters to sitting with international critics and discussing the future of cinema.

Thank you for your time, Pouya. It was a very good conversation, and I hope we will soon hear that your first feature film has gone into production.

• Follow Pouya Aghelizadeh on Instagram @pouya_aghel

The films are Magma, Maybe Tomorrow, Birds of War and One In A Million. They bring together stories connected to Algeria, Syria and Lebanon, from family memory and political disappearance to exile, journalism, childhood and the search for home.

Magma

Magma, directed by Mia Bendrimia, won the Grand Jury Award for the International First Feature Competition.

The documentary begins with a personal search. Bendrimia looks into her Algerian family’s ties to both sides of the Independence War, only to find a history shaped by silence, contradiction and buried memory.

Rather than treating the past as something settled, Magma follows how colonial history continues to live inside families. The film connects intimate questions of inheritance with wider political wounds that remain unresolved across generations.

Maybe Tomorrow

Maybe Tomorrow, directed by Wafa Mustafa and Waad Al-Kateab, won the Grand Jury Award in the International Short Film Competition.

The film follows Syrian activist Wafa Mustafa after her father disappears under Assad’s regime. Her search for answers becomes a record of loss, memory and the uncertainty carried by families of the disappeared.

Through one daughter’s story, Maybe Tomorrow opens onto a broader Syrian reality. It gives political violence a personal frame, without reducing it to private grief alone.

Birds of War

Birds of War, directed by Abd Alkader Habak and Janay Boulos, received a Special Mention for the Tim Hetherington Award.

The film follows the relationship between a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman across 13 years of revolution, war and exile. Their story is told through personal archives, messages, voice notes and footage from the front lines.

Birds of War places love beside journalism, not as escape from conflict, but as part of the same lived experience. It shows how private life, reporting and historical violence can become inseparable.

One In A Million

One In A Million, directed by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, won the Shine Global Children’s Resilience Award for Documentary.

Filmed over 10 years, the film follows a Syrian girl and her family after they flee to Germany in 2015. Their journey moves between Syria, Germany and the difficult emotional space in between.

The film looks at exile through childhood and family life. It follows how displacement changes language, memory, relationships and the meaning of home over time.

The awards bring these four films into the final list of recognized titles at Sheffield DocFest 2026, alongside other documentaries from this year’s international programme.

Congratulations to Mia Bendrimia, Wafa Mustafa, Waad Al-Kateab, Abd Alkader Habak, Janay Boulos, Itab Azzam, Jack MacInnes and their teams.

- Abbas Souzian, Istanbul

But when that time really arrives, the questions become less simple. What remains of our sense of purpose? Do we still feel useful? How much of life is still open? And how close does the thought of death become?

At first, Outliving Shakespeare seems to follow a theatre project inside an Armenian care home. Elderly residents rehearse Shakespeare’s Sins under the guidance of theatre director Garnik Seyranyan. But as the film stays with them, the rehearsal room opens into something quieter and more difficult: memories of love, regret, family, displacement, ageing and death.

Directed by Inna Sahakyan and Ruben Ghazaryan, the documentary was screened in the LifeTogether section of DOK.fest München 2026.

The film remains close to one building. Its corridors, old elevator, Soviet traces, stray cats and white care robot are part of the same world as the residents. Theatre gives them a reason to gather, but the film slowly finds its shape in their daily lives.

This interview was conducted online. Inna Sahakyan joined the conversation, Ruben Ghazaryan from Yerevan, and I from Istanbul. The text combines their written answers with a later online conversation about the film, its characters, and the choices that shaped the final cut.

Inside The Care Home

Abbas: I came to the film with the idea that working with elderly people requires a deep level of trust. Was that true in your experience? And was there a moment when you felt the camera was no longer a guest, but part of their daily life?

Inna: I would actually disagree a little. While trust is essential in any documentary, I have worked with elderly people a lot in the past and they are often the most open part of society.

They have already lived their lives. They are at peace with their past and usually with their own mistakes. They have nothing left to be ashamed of. It is a very interesting group of people to work with because they simply want to be heard, and that was exactly the case with our film.

The core of our filming really began once we became part of their daily routine, which happened quite quickly. They stopped noticing the camera and were completely open. They would forget the equipment was even there.

Because of this, it is one of the rare films where you can truly experience pure observational storytelling. They looked forward to us coming, we became a real part of their lives, and we still keep in touch with them today.

Abbas: Garnik Seyranyan feels like someone who brings theatre into the care home so people can speak again. How did you see his place in this small community?

Inna: Garnik is a wonderful person and a great team player. His role was much more than just a theatre director. To the people living there, he became a father figure, a brother, a friend, and even a psychologist. They respected and trusted him a lot, which was so interesting to watch.

There is a funny story about this. Garnik told us that after his first play with them, one of the older actors said, “Garnik, do not worry. When you get older, you have earned your place here with us. We will make sure you get the best room and the best care.”

They truly accepted him as part of their family, but still had deep respect for him.

Ruben: Garnik was also very important for the filmmaking process. We worked closely with him, talking about our ideas and what topics he could bring up to help people share their memories. He came up with his own ideas to try during rehearsals. Even though not everything made it into the film, he helped us so much to connect with the residents.

We are very thankful for his creativity and open heart.

Abbas: You also mentioned Garnik Seyranyan’s wife, Marine Asatryan. What did you know about her work, and did it connect to this idea of theatre as therapy?

Inna: I really don’t know much about all the details. I just know that she works with a group of disabled children, and they also do children’s plays. That is also part of therapy for the children.

She was doing it earlier than Garnik started working with the elderly centre. So I think he was inspired by her. They are really an amazing couple, with their relationship and with the way they combine their skills and interests. Marine also visits the troupe before every premiere of the Tarmani theatre with the elders. She asks them to stand in a circle and conducts a therapy session for success, followed by a prayer.

The prayer scene at the end of the film was her initiative. Everyone in the troupe really respects her.

Abbas: Did the rehearsal process give the residents something to wait for?

Inna: Yes, definitely. Garnik started this theatre project long before we began filming. The Shakespeare play was actually their sixth or seventh performance. He started it as a therapy project, and I really think it works.

The theatre became a place where people could escape from their hard daily lives. For some, it was a chance to finally live out the artistic dreams they had when they were young.

It became a very important part of the community. Even the residents who just came to watch really enjoyed it. It gave everyone something special to look forward to.

Abbas: Do you think art can still change something at this stage of life?

Inna: Yes, definitely. Art always opens up different layers in any human being, and it does not matter what age they are. Even at an old age, art can change something.

Actually, it is even more beautiful because when they commit to something like this, they understand that this may be their last chance to express themselves. Even while they are not physically in the same condition as in their young days, they truly want to achieve the best result.

This act of creating and performing itself is very beautiful and deeply human.

When The Play Became Life

Abbas: At some point, the rehearsal seems to become less important than the lives around it. Did that happen during filming, or later in the edit?

Inna: In observational documentary, you never really know where the story will lead you. But during filming, we witnessed their personal dramas coming to the surface. Their real life stories were as deep as Shakespeare, but so much more real to us. Because of this, we naturally started to focus less on the play and more on their actual lives.

In fact, the final decision to leave out the actual performance on stage was made during the editing process. We realized that the human stories became much more important than the theatricals.

One of the most touching stories for us was Anahit, a woman in a wheelchair, and her transformation. During our time there, she changed from a woman who was always everywhere and had a very sharp tongue, almost like a Shakespearean jester, into a woman locked in her own loneliness.

It was very heavy to watch, but also so real. She seemed to understand that her life had passed by, she saw her own mistakes, and she felt a deep need to be forgiven.

Abbas: Ruben, you described Anahit as the spirit of the film. What made her presence so important to you?

Ruben: For me, she is the spirit of our film. There are no words to describe it. Cinema speaks a language that you cannot say verbally.

She is part of the chain that makes this film happen in that way. I don’t know how to explain it. She is my favorite.

What The Film Leaves Out

Abbas: You filmed for more than three years and had over 300 hours of material. How did you decide what the film should follow?

Inna: We had over 300 hours of footage, filmed over more than three years, with more than ten main protagonists. The care home building itself and the other residents were also a vital part of the story. Naturally, the editing process was long and challenging.

Film is a collective art form, and we had many creative debates within our core team: Ruben, Lilit Movsisyan, our scriptwriter and on-set director, myself, and our great editor Artur Sahakyan. We each brought our own strengths to the room. I focused on building constructive storytelling, while the emotional core was carefully shaped together. I hope we found a beautiful balance.

There were so many different ways this film could have been shaped, and completely different stories could have emerged. We had to face a lot of “kill your darlings” moments. It is simply impossible to fit every interesting event and deeply personal storyline of these people into just one movie.

We made some very difficult choices along the way. Initially, the plan was to focus much more on the theatre play itself. However, the film naturally shifted to focus more on the real lives and personal dramas of protagonists. Because of this, we made the tough decision to leave out much of the actual central play.

Another emotional cut for me was Ligia’s baptism scene. I truly loved that moment, but it ultimately did not fit the final narrative. Leaving out these stories was absolutely an emotional challenge, but it was necessary to find the true heart of the film.

Abbas: What was Ligia’s baptism scene like?

Inna: It was not just that moment. There were so many moments we had to leave out because the film was always going to be around 90 minutes.

Ligia was a classic Soviet communist. Lenin was on her wall, in her albums, everywhere. On my very first research trip, they were premiering a previous play, because Garnik had already been working there for a while. At the end, the Communist Party gave her a certificate, and she was so proud. That was also one of the moments I really wanted to keep in the film.

Then, while we were filming, she started to feel that death was close. She wanted to try the other side too, let’s say. The baptism was very funny. She was flirting with the priest, as usual. It was not only her. Several people, maybe five or six, decided to be baptized.

We tried to place that scene in the edit many times. But it was also about timing and balance.

Ruben: It was about timing and balance between the time dedicated to every person, every character. If we put that scene and other scenes of her, it was too much for her. So we decided to take it out.

Abbas: You also told me about a lower floor in the care home, a place closer to illness and death. Why did you decide not to include it?

Ruben: There are four floors in that building. There is the first floor, second floor and third floor. But the floor on the ground level is closer to death, in any interpretation of this word.

When someone has no hope to survive, maybe because of illness or psychological conditions, they are moved from the first, second or third floor to the ground floor. It is actually a very well-equipped place. It is not like a bunker. But when you get to the zero floor, you never get back.

We had footage from there. We had footage of hopelessly sick, very old people. We also had the priest visiting the zero floor and giving people a chance to talk to God. But it was too depressive, and we decided not to use that material.

Inna: It was one of those “kill your darlings” parts again. We tried to put it in very delicately, but the place and the environment were very harsh.

It is really a very heavy place. We wanted to concentrate more on hope in the film. Toward the end, you can feel the hope fading more. We start with much more hope and life, and we come closer to the end of life and to the understanding of values for each one, especially for Anahit in the movie.

But that place was closest to death rather than life. That is why we decided to exclude it. It was really very, very depressing.

The Building And Its Time

Abbas: The robot, the cats and the old corridors create a strange contrast in the film. How did these details enter the film?

Ruben: The modern robot, the stray cats, and the kitsch panels on the walls are all simply part of the reality there. It is a place where time mixes the past and the future. The camera just could not ignore this beautiful eclecticism.

We are so grateful to our fantastic Director of Photography, Bagrat Saroyan. He has a very sharp and strong eye, and he beautifully caught all of these amazing images.

These visual elements did not change our personal connection with the residents at all. Instead, they helped us to capture the complex feeling of time and how the residents live within their own complex reality.

Abbas: The building feels almost like another resident: the elevator, corridors, Stalin portraits and cats. How did you decide to film the place this way?

Inna: For us, the building was never just a background. The old elevator, the long corridors, and the Soviet relics hold the heavy weight of a whole history. In many ways, the care home is a physical reflection of the residents’ own lives. Just like the people living there, the building has a past that is slowly fading, representing the decline of a specific era.

Then, the careful work of our editing team sharpened those real elements to create a strong metaphoric contrast. We wanted to show the difference between the dream world of the theatre and the surreal feeling of the building itself.

Abbas: You said the people and the building felt as if they were made from the same material. What did you mean?

Ruben: The place itself is a character. It is built with those people. The old walls are the same as the older people there. They are organically integrated into that place. They are not different things.

Abbas: The film reminded me at times of Soviet cinema. Was that mainly because of the editing, or the music?

Inna: I actually do not think our film is close to those classic Soviet documentary masters. I mean, I wish I could have the depth of a masterpiece like Ten Minutes Older. Our editing is much more based on the senses, impulses, moods, and the contrasts of cinema verite.

But I really think what gives the film that specific Soviet cinema feeling is actually the music. We used the music of the amazing Oleg Karavaychuk. He was a brilliant Russian composer, and his music was often used in classic Soviet films.

It is his music that brings that unique melancholic mood and atmosphere to the film, which naturally reminds people of that era and that style of cinema.

Shakespeare And Memory

Abbas: Shakespeare can be heavy, especially for elderly non-professional actors. How did it become close to their own memories and wounds?

Ruben: The Shakespearean text became a beautiful metaphor for our film. These plays are about the big dramas of life like loneliness, love and forgiveness. We used them to show the clear parallels with the real lives of the residents.

It highlights that these human struggles are universal across all languages, times and societies. This small theatre group in the retirement home became a kind of capsule of time and place, where the whole circle of life and all these huge dramas are concentrated.

For the elders themselves, Garnik understood that it would be too hard for them to memorize and deliver the exact Shakespearean lines. So, he built the performance around the stories and feelings of Shakespeare.

When exact classic lines were needed on stage, Garnik used professionally recorded voices, and the elders acted and reacted to those voices instead of saying the heavy text directly.

This was a very smart approach. The text itself was not the main focus, but it gave Garnik the perfect opportunity to start deep discussions with the group about these themes. In turn, it gave us the chance to film their genuine, personal reflections.

Shakespeare simply became the key to open up their own memories, lost loves and family wounds.

Gayane And Artsakh

Abbas: Gayane brings Artsakh into the film in a very personal way. How did you decide to include this part without allowing the political context to overpower her individual life? Were you worried that international audiences might see her story mainly through a political lens and miss the private, human part of her life?

Inna: From the very beginning, our goal was never to make a political film. We wanted to stay inside the microcosm of the care home. But as it often happens, the documentary reality took over our initial plans. We just could not leave her story out.

The blockade and ethnic cleansing were the painful reality happening while we were filming. We simply could not make a film and ignore this topic, especially when it directly affects Gayane’s life.

We filmed Gayane only briefly at the beginning. She was staying in the retirement home because she had to flee during the 2020 war. When the ‘peace agreement’ was signed and a so-called ‘peace’ was seemingly established, she returned to Artsakh almost right after we started filming.

But then the blockade started, and she was basically stuck there. She had to flee her homeland again after the shelling of the peaceful population in September 2023, when the entire Armenian population of the region was forcibly displaced.

Her story reflects the reality of all our people at that time. It was not only the residents of the retirement home who were helplessly watching the blockade, starvation, shelling, and escape. All of us were forced to sit and watch silently, unable to do anything, witnessing the absolute silence of the international community.

When Gayane returned to the retirement home, her big, sad eyes were telling much more about the tragedy that happened than any political statement could.

During the editing process, we realized this topic had to run through the whole film, but it had to be shown exactly how we experienced it in our daily lives. That is why we chose to use the television. We combined the TV news reports covering the outside reality with the deeply personal reality of Gayane’s forced displacement.

No, we do not think the film leaves room for audiences to see Gayane’s story only through a political lens and miss the private, human part of her life. Our main worry was actually that the situation itself might not be clear to non-Armenian audiences.

The reality was very complex, and we chose not to give a direct, linear explanation of exactly what was happening outside. However, it seems our worries were unnecessary. In all the international reviews, Gayane’s deeply personal storyline and her human tragedy have been clearly understood and reflected.

Abbas: Is there another film you would suggest for understanding Artsakh through a family story?

Inna: There are several, of course. I can mention one of my favorite and very important films about Artsakh, 1489. It is not political at all. It stays within one family.

The director, Shoghakat Vardanyan, filmed her parents while they had lost contact with her brother during the first days of the war. It shows the inside of the family, the pain of regular people who have lost connection with their son. Later, they find parts of his body.

It is a very intense, very strong documentary. It is not classically made. It was made with a phone, by a very brave director, and it is her debut film.

Distance, Observation And Ageing

Abbas: Did you ever step in as filmmakers, or did you mostly stay with observation?

Inna: We never intervened or changed the story. We stayed true to our role as observers. However, we did help create certain situations that allowed the characters to open up and show different sides of their personalities.

For example, together with Garnik, we arranged a special photo shoot for the residents. We wanted to see them all dressed up, wearing makeup, shining, and in a happy mood while being photographed for a theatre poster.

Basically, we just helped to set up the situation, leaving space for our protagonists to reflect.

Abbas: After more than three years with these residents, what stayed with you most?

Ruben: What stayed with me is that we are ageing as well. We are now closer to them than to young people.

That is the main thing I took from there for myself.

But there were many beautiful moments and also many sad moments. It is a very dense place, dense with every color and every mood and every rhythm. It is hard to separate one thing.

So we tried to put that character of the place in the film. The place itself is a character, I think.

I would like to thank Inna Sahakyan and Ruben Ghazaryan for taking the time to speak with Souzian Dispatch. Our conversation took place online, with Inna Sahakyan, Ruben Ghazaryan from Yerevan, and me from Istanbul. Outliving Shakespeare screened at DOK.fest München 2026 in the LifeTogether section.

The film screened in Munich on Thursday, May 7 at 3:30 PM, Sunday, May 10 at 11:00 AM, Tuesday, May 12 at 6:00 PM, and Saturday, May 16 at 8:30 PM. Screening venues included Neues Rottmann, Pinakothek der Moderne, Filmmuseum, and HFF - Kino 2.

• Read more on the official DOK.fest München film page:
  https://www.dokfest-muenchen.de/films/outliving-shakespeare?lang=en

• Follow Inna Sahakyan on Instagram:
  https://instagram.com/i_sahakyan_i

• Follow Ruben Ghazaryan on Instagram:
  https://instagram.com/ghazaryan.83

About Outliving Shakespeare

Outliving Shakespeare is a documentary by Ruben Ghazaryan and Inna Sahakyan about residents of an Armenian retirement home who take part in a Shakespeare project that opens space for love, loss, displacement and memory.

Set inside a decaying post-Soviet care home, the film follows a group of elderly residents as theatre enters their daily lives. Through rehearsal, conversation and performance, the film reflects on ageing, loneliness, retirement, memory, acting, life and death, and the fragile place where stage drama and lived experience begin to touch each other.