Skip to main content

VIFF+ Members’ Early Bird Day is on now! Save up to 30% off Festival Ticket Packs and Passes

Numb film image

Numb

This event has passed

North American Premiere

Under Iranian law, from elementary school, boys and girls attend school separately. But in kindergarten and preschool there is no gender division. Numb follows a handful of boys and girls in their last year of pre-school as they learn to navigate gender whilst imitating the world of adults through make-believe and childhood games. Roham, the protagonist, is a six-year-old boy whose innocent love for classmate Rana and his curiosity about her shy and reluctant personality unravel dark and horrifying secrets of her life.  Amir Toodehroosta beautifully depicts the innocence that exists in childhood, even in a society where religion and pain cast a constant shadow. The filmmaker does not force these issues but allows them to surface through the gaze of this six-year-old boy who tries to make sense of the world and his place in it. The film’s stunning cinematography transports us directly into the world of childhood, as we see things through their lens not only conceptually but technically.

Director
Cast

Ayhan Shaygan, Shabnam Dadkhah, Nora Hanifeh Zadeh, Rayan Razmi

Credits
Country of Origin

Iran

Year

2022

Series

Focus

Language

In Farsi with English subtitles

Film Contact
18+
91 min
Action & Suspense Drama

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits

Executive Producer

Sina Sharbafi

Producer

Amir Toodehroosta

Screenwriter

Amir Toodehroosta

Cinematography

Soroush Alizadeh

Editor

Maysam Samadi Bahrami

Original Music

Fardin Khalatbari

Director

Amir Toodehroosta headshot

Amir Toodehroosta

Amir Toodehroosta, an Iranian independent artist and filmmaker, was born in 1982 in Iran. He studied filmmaking at IYCS and Theater at Sooreh University. He has made two documentaries and seventeen short films which have been selected and awarded in many festivals. His first feature film Paat was selected for various international festivals including Warsaw and Tokyo. Numb is his second feature.

Filmography: Paat (2013)

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

Samia

Dir. Yasemin Şamdereli
102 min

Despite growing up in Mogadishu, Somalia, during the civil war, Samia Yusuf Omar persists in her dream of becoming an Olympic athlete and competes in Beijing, 2008 -- with London, 2012 next on her agenda. Based on a true story.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Sudan, Remember Us

Dir. Hind Meddeb
78 min

A portrait of young artists and activists, Meddeb's doc charts events in Khartoum between 2019 -- in the immediate wake of the revolution that deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir -- and the mood four years later, when the country has been torn apart by civil war.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Margaret

Dir. Kenneth Lonergan
186 min

Seventeen-year-old Lisa is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident. But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea

Dir. Beatrice Minger & Christoph Schaub
89 min

In this elegant non fiction film, actors play Irish designer Eileen Gray, her lover, the architect Jean Badovici, and modernist superstar Le Corbusier, who would become obsessed with the house on the Cote d'Azur that Eileen designed.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Dir. Embeth Davidtz
98 min

Embeth Davidtz adapts Alexandra Fuller's memoir of growing up in Rhodesia as it transformed into post-colonial Zimbabwe in 1980. Lexi Venter is astonishing as the feral child at its centre.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Scarecrow

Dir. Jerry Schatzberg
112 min

A bittersweet, touching buddy movie with Gene Hackman as a volatile tramp, Max, and Al Pacino as "Lion", a drifter now set on returning to the wife and kid he abandoned years ago. Hackman's favourite of his own movies.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre