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Exclusive: F&Me to produce The President, set to shoot in Georgia in early 2014.

Film and Music Entertainment (F&Me) will produce Award-winning Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s first English-language feature.

The President will shoot in Georgia in early 2014, marking Makhmalbaf’s first fiction feature since The Man Who Came with the Snow in 2009.

The story is set in a fictional Caucasus country and is about a dictator whose regime is brought down by a coup d’etat. He and his young grandson have to travel across the country disguised as street musicians, and he gets to know the ordinary people he ruled in a new light.

“After the Arab Spring, a number of dictators fell: Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gadhaffi,” said writer/director Makhmalbaf, “but statistics show that there are over 40 dictators of this kind still in power.

“In the course of the Arab Spring and in the search for democracy, we have witnessed...

Mohsen Makhmalbaf calmly announces early in The Gardener that he does not belong to any religion, and is instead an agnostic filmmaker. Now in his mid-50s, the Iranian former fundamentalist—long since disillusioned, even living in exile since Ahmadinejad assumed power—has come to film the gardens within the world's center for the Bahá'í faith, located in Haifa, Israel. His embittered adult son, Maysam, also a filmmaker, accompanies him while declaring that religion has caused humanity nothing but trouble. Father and son strike a deal: Each filmmaker will record the other, as Mohsen seeks to capture the good in this place and Maysam the bad. Both men go on to meet believers who explain how the Bahá'í (the largest religious minority in Iran ...

Makhmalbaf says he travelled to Jerusalem film festival as 'ambassador for peace' and received a warm welcome

One of Iran's most famous film-makers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a former revolutionary who spent four years in jail under the late shah's rule, has made headlines again after breaking a taboo by visiting Israel.

Makhmalbaf, who was invited by the Jerusalem film festival, said he went as "an ambassador for peace" to promote Iranian art in a country that has previously threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike against his homeland. His visit last week has stirred a heated debate among Iranians.

"I went there to take a message of peace," he told the Guardian. "I try to unite people through arts, I am citizen of cinema, and cinema has no border, and in fact before my journey to Israel my film travelled to that country many years before."

Makhmalbaf, a leading figure in Iranian cinema's new wave movement,...

Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf speaks about Iran-Israel relationship.

Tom Shoval’s debut feature Youth, which premiered earlier this year in Berlin’s Panorama section, is the winner of the 30th Jerusalem Film Festival. The story of two brothers who try to help their family’s dwindling finances by kidnapping a classmate and asking for ransom, also collected an acting award for the two real-life brothers, David and Eitan Cunio, playing the leads. Youth also won best editing for Joelle Alexis.

The jury, headed by former New York Film Festival festival head Richard Pena, who was also the recipient of the festival’s Life Achievement Award, gave its second prize to Maya Dreyfuss’ She’s Coming Home, added an acting award for Tali Sharon’s performance in this film and best cinematography for Shai Peleg. Best script award went to writer/director Adi Adwan for Arabani, a feature film shot in a Druze village.

The documentary...