The Festivals That Have Fallen Out with Tehran

The second half of the year coincides with the start of film festivals in Tehran. From the Short Film Festival to the Cinema Verite Festival and the Fajr Film Festival. Festivals that, instead of being held in the heart of this romantic Tehran, have for several years taken refuge in one of the identity-less and pretentious buildings of Tehran on the edge of a highway with perpetual traffic. A building in which, every time I am present in it, a feeling of being in the Joint Anti-Sabotage Committee — the same Ebrat Museum — comes over me.

The Tehran Short Film Festival is the last event held in this so-called cinema complex. Short cinema, which for long years, with the presence of distinguished critics and curious filmmakers, was a place for discovering new talents of Iranian cinema, has now, with its migration to this frightening complex, separated its account from the Tehran we know. In which edition was the last time critics such as Javad Tousi, Ahmad Talebinejad, Tahmasb Solhjoo, Khosro Dehghan and... were present at the Mellat Cinema Complex to watch short and documentary works?! Coming and going to this complex requires precise planning and dedicating a whole day. One must go before the Niayesh traffic begins and return in the final hours of the night after the relative flow of cars inside this highway is eased. And that with spending a cost of several hundred thousand tomans for an internet taxi — and that is if the esteemed “ambassadors”! do not act coy and accept the trip.

The Mellat Complex is not friends with the city of Tehran and seems to be a piece separate from the Tehran we know. It seems to be a building that has flown in from Dubai and settled in a northern spot.

The festivals that these days choose the Mellat Complex to be held in have another important feature too: in addition to tea and cake and snacks and lunch and dinner, they also bring the “critic and writer” with them here! In this short period of holding the Short Film Festival, we see fewer independent and attractive pieces that the media have published about this event without a “duty.” Professional criticism and analysis have given their place to “commissioning” pieces with a sufficient fee! And the free flow of analyzing works has become something like the shops of the Alaeddin Passage, where everyone has rented a desk in those one-span spaces and stands behind it, busy trading. The volume of these productions in cyberspace and the IRIB is high, but the quality?! It is regrettable. Even a television reporter in the middle of this becomes the producer of a program about short film, but alas, he neither has correct diction nor can even use suitable sentence constructions for criticizing and analyzing short cinema.

This is how the professional critic and cinema writer becomes unmotivated to step into this bazaar-like market based on “numbers and figures.” Moreover, even if he makes the trouble of reaching the Mellat Complex easy for himself, he must have reserved a ticket in advance and stand in long queues for a glass of tea and.... This is how the short filmmaker is left with a volume of low-quality praising pieces that bring no realistic evaluation for him either.

With the end of the festival, the table is cleared away until another festival and a repetition of the wrong routine.

* Filmmaker and writer