Iranian Oscar Winner Showcased By BIFF
The 2012 Bermuda International Film Festival [BIFF] will open a window on global cinema for local audiences with a World Cinema showcase featuring last month’s Iranian winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.
The World Cinema line up includes Oscar winner “A Separation” as well as three films nominated for the same category at last month’s Academy Awards: “Bullhead,” “Footnote,” and “In Darkness.”
“A Separation” centres on the pending divorce of an upper-middle-class Iranian couple, one of whom wishes to emigrate due to the prevailing political conditions.
The Iranian film has been met with almost universal acclaim and was the best-reviewed movie of 2011.
Deborah Young of “The Hollywood Reporter” said: “Just when it seemed impossible for Iranian filmmakers to express themselves meaningfully outside the bounds of censorship, ‘A Separation’ comes along to prove the contrary. Apparently simple on a narrative level yet morally, psychologically and socially complex, it succeeds in bringing Iranian society into focus for in a way few other films have done.”
Trailer For Oscar-Winning Iranian Film “A Separation”
In a hugely positive review from “Screen Daily”, Lee Marshall wrote: “Showing a control of investigative pacing that recalls classic Hitchcock and a feel for ethical nuance that is all his own, director Asghar Farhadi has hit upon a story that is not only about men and women, children and parents, justice and religion in today’s Iran, but that raises complex and globally relevant questions of responsibility, of the subjectivity and contingency of ‘telling the truth’, and of how thin the line can be between inflexibility and pride – especially of the male variety – and selfishness and tyranny.”
Alissa Simon from “Variety” called it the director’s strongest work yet: “Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging… The provocative plot casts a revealing light on contempo Iranian society, taking on issues of gender, class, justice and honor as a secular middle-class family in the midst of upheaval winds up in conflict with an impoverished religious one.”
And David Thomson for “The New Republic” wrote: “You cannot watch the film without feeling kinship with the characters and admitting their decency as well as their mistakes. The American films made this year that deal with the internal detail and difficulty of family life — like ‘The Descendants’ — are airy, pretty and affluent compared with ‘A Separation’. With the best will in the world, George Clooney cannot discard his aura of stardom, yet the actors in the Iranian film seem caught in their characters’ traps.”
“Wuthering Heights,” the latest offering from director Andrea Arnold, whose short film, “Wasp,” screened at BIFF 2004 and later won a Short Film Academy Award is also being shown in the World Cinema showcase.
The celebrated narrative features “Corpo Celeste,” “Declaration of War,” and “Where Do We Go Now?,” along with thought-provoking documentaries, “Khodorkovsky,” “Putin’s Kiss,” “Whores’ Glory” and “The Island President” round out this section of the 15th edition of BIFF.
BIFF 2012 runs from March 16-22 featuring dozens of films screening both in competition and also in such categories as Shorts, Masterworks and Modern Masters. The online and physical box office — courtesy of Freisenbruch Meyer at 75 Front Street in Hamilton — will open at 11am on Wednesday [Mar.7].
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