Canadian Premiere
Behind on her rent and facing eviction, forty-something Hanieh (Hanieh Tavassoli) has everything riding on a semi-autobiographical screenplay that she’s just sold to a friend (Pegah Ahangarani) who’s rushing it into production. However, rehearsals prove dispiriting at best. While she considers every scene sacrosanct, the cast declare the character modelled after Hanieh a “bastard.” Finding little sympathy amongst her colleagues (who include an ornery, scene-stealing rooster), Hanieh seeks counsel from her father’s ghost and kinship with the audience, as she occasionally breaks the fourth wall.
In depicting Hanieh’s dizzying, tragicomic descent into a living nightmare, Faeze Azizkhani infuses her film with anarchic energy, rapid-fire dialogue, palpable anxiety, and biting humour that recalls 90s-era indie-filmmaking-gone-awry fare like In the Soup and Living in Oblivion. That said, there are culturally specific stakes here as Azizkhani illustrates just how stacked the odds are against a female filmmaker striving for artistic expression and creative freedom.
Presented by
Hanieh Tavassoli, Pegah Ahangarani Farahani, Ali Mosaffa, Pedram Sharifi, Ramin Sadighi, Amaneh Agharezakashi
Iran/Germany
2022
In Farsi with English subtitles
Gender or Sexual Discrimination
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Mother and the Bear
Johnny Ma’s film stars Kim Ho-jung as a Korean woman who flies to Winnipeg when her immigrant daughter is hospitalized there. This crowd-pleaser plays up cultural differences to hilarious effect and offers a touching take on mother-daughter tension.
Afternoons of Solitude
Pacification director Albert Serra turns his unflinching gaze on the subject of bullfighting, and in particular the famous young matador Andrés Roca Rey. The film challenges us to look its subject square in the eye and draw our own conclusions.
The Executioner
Regularly cited as the greatest Spanish film ever made, Berlanga's masterpiece is a pitch black comedy about an undertaker lined up by the state executioner to marry his beautiful daughter -- but he'll also have to inherit the old man's job.
8
The always stylish, idiosyncratic Basque auteur Julio Medem is back with one of his most ambitious films (and our closing night gala), a sweeping historical romance in eight chapters, spanning eight decades in Spanish history from the 1930s to the present day.
Credits
Executive Producer
Daryosh Hekmat
Producer
Manijeh Hekmat, Mahshid Ahangarani Farahani
Screenwriter
Faeze Azizkhani
Cinematography
Alireza Barazandeh
Editor
Hamidreza Barzegar, Majid Barzegar
Production Design
Soheil Danesh Eshraghi
Original Music
Hesam-eddin Salehbeig
Director
Faeze Azizkhani
Born in 1982 in Tehran, Faeze Azizkhani completed her courses in Abbas Kiarostami’s workshops. In 1999, she started her career as a short film director, script supervisor, and assistant director. After directing some award-winning shorts and documentaries, Azizkhani wrote and directed her debut feature film, For a Rainy Day (2015), working with Kiarostami as her advisor. The film screened at the Fajr and Silk Road International Film Festivals. Her second film, The Locust, premiered at SXSW 2022.
Filmography: For a Rainy Day (2015)