Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF) and Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) are pleased to announce their collaboration on an ambitious retrospective called The History of Iranian Cinema by Its Creators.
FIFF will launch the retrospective programme at their 28th edition, for which 14 major Iranian directors have named 27 titles, from 1933 to 2006. The 14 directors who have taken part are: Mania Akbari, Kaveh Bakhtiari, Bahram Beyzaie, Asghar Farhadi, Sepideh Farsi, Mahmoud Ghaffari, Bahman Ghobadi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Shahram Mokri, Amir Naderi, Jafar Panahi, Shirin Neshat, Rafi Pitts and Mohammad Rasoulof. Some of them will attend Fribourg to present their choices.
Iran’s cinema is one of the richest in the world, but the view of Iranian cinema available to worldwide audiences has been subject to numerous restrictions, which have obscured the continuity of Iranian filmmaking before and after the 1979 revolution. That continuity is the concern of this major retrospective, for which leading contemporary Iranian directors have been contacted to choose and introduce the key works of Iranian film history.
The complete list of titles to be screened will be revealed at FIFF’s line-up press conference on 12th March 2014. The Cinemathèque Suisse (National Film Archives) will also, simultaneously with FIFF, screen part of this historical event.
