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Director(s): Abolfazl Jalili
Iran & Japan/2007/Farsi dialogue with English subtitles/Colour/35mm/98 mins
Cast: Mehdi Moradi, Kumiko Aso, Mehdi Negahban, Hamide Hedayati
Crew: Yuji Sadai(Producer), Yungchen Lhamo(Composer)
STORY:
In present-day Iran, studious and devout Hafez (Mehdi Moradi), 17, nevertheless finds poetry as compelling as his studies. Called to instruct the Great Mufti’s young daughter, Nabat (Kumiko Aso), they sit in adjacent rooms and discuss, through a high window in the wall, religion, philosophy and poetry. When she recites one of his poems he looks through the window and they fall in love, but Hafez is reported to the Mufti, banned from the house and Nabat falls sick. Thus begin Hafez’s great trials in the name of love and art.
“Through his understanding of the works of the great Sufi poet Hafez (still revered and quoted in Iran) Jalili re-imagines Hafez’s life as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story. A loving and unusual tribute to the poet, as well as a celebration of creativity, it is playfully anachronistic: Jalili has Hafez travelling by truck and motorbike, even as he upholds a tradition unchanged for centuries. Jalili’s deceptively simple, visual and lyrical style reconfirms him as one of Iran’s most original cinema voices, and Hafez recently won the Special Jury Award at the Rome Film Festival.” – Sheila Whitaker
DIRECTOR's BIO:
ABOLFAZL JALILI was born in 1957 in Iran and has been a filmmaker since the mid-1970s. He made his feature debut with Milad (1983), followed by, among others, Scabies (1987) and Det Means Girl (1994; Golden Osella Award at Venice), Dance of Dust (1998; Silver Leopard Award at Locarno) and Tales of Kish (1999), co-directed with Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Nasser Taghvai, which competed at Cannes.
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