News

Houman Seyyedi’s darkly comic drama World War III has been named as Iran’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards, set for March 12 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. See the full list of entries by country below.

The film chosen “unanimously” by Iran’s Oscars committee follows the day laborer Shakib (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who after being cast in a movie, must secretly shelter his lover on the set or risk losing her and all that movie stardom has promised him.

Seyyedi, Arian Vazirdaftari and Azad Jafarian scripted the pic, which world premiered in the Horizons section of this year’s Venice Film Festival and went on to win the section’s prizes for Best Film and Best Actor (Tanabandeh). Its cast also includes Neda Jebreili, Mahsa Hejazi and Navid Nosrati.

Parviz Sheikh Tadi, the speaker and a member of the committee in...

Anger and pain course through this film about an architect who returns to his village, but it fails to deliver the emotional payoff

Iranian actor-director Niki Karimi has created a very involved film, clotted with anger and pain, straining towards some emotional meaning or resolution which, for me, never satisfyingly emerges. She has co-written it with the film’s leading man, Hadi Hejazifar who with unsmiling intensity plays Kazem, a respected architect bearing the honorific “atabai”, (meaning roughly “great man”). Kazem returns to his home village near Iran’s Lake Urmia (an important tourist attraction) after some time away, and his homecoming opens old wounds within him.

This home village was where his sister took her own life, after abuse from the man to whom she was forced into marriage by their cruel father, while secretly in love with Kazem’s best friend, whom Kazem now despises for not fighting for her.

Rouhollah Zamani, the lead actor of Majid Majidi’s Oscar shortlisted child labor drama “Sun Children” and winner of the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor or actress at the Venice Film Festival, has been cast in a TV drama series, “Mehdi Bakeri,” about soldiers in the Iran-Iraq War. Variety has been given the first image from the series (above).

Meanwhile, sales agent Celluloid Dreams has told Variety that “Sun Children,” which is shortlisted in the International Feature Film category for the 93rd Academy Awards, has been acquired by additional distributors, including Mongrel Media in Canada, and Bodega Films in France.

Other territories sold include German-speaking Europe (Mfa+ Film Distribution), Benelux (Cherry Pickers), Scandinavia (Angel Films), Spain (Caramel Films), Turkey (Filmarti Film), Mexico (Alameda Films), Indonesia (Falcon Pictures), Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam (Suraya), and Taiwan (Filmware). The film was previously picked up by Strand in the U.S.

“Sun...