Tassvir Film Festival, a new section of the celebration, screening all the films that have received awards in different Iranian festivals, was also inaugurated with a screening of the short film, “Bread and Alley, 50 Years Later”, made by Maziar Cheshmeh Alai.
Cheshmeh Alai made his short based on “Bread and Alley,” a film directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami based on a story by his brother Taqi in 1970.
The 10-minute film was Kiarostami’s first directorial effort and was shot in black and white. It centered around a young boy on his way home from school who ran into a hungry dog while carrying his own loaf of bread.
In a ceremony attended by a limited number of participants, the director of the celebration, Seifollah Samadian, called a 57-year-old man on stage with his loaf of bread.
He was Seyyed Reza Hashemi, the little boy of Kiarostami’s short film.
Kiarostami spotted Reza Hashemi playing with his friends in the alley and asked his parents to let him play in his film. When they moved to another neighborhood, he found him and asked him to play in another film, “A Wedding Suit”.
Director Cheshmeh Alai said that he tried to make use of the special elements of the films by Kiarostami, like working with non-actors.
The previous edition of the celebration was also inaugurated with a screening of “Sohanak”, a film that depicts Abbas Kiarostami playing the role of the leading character of his movie “Taste of Cherry” on a pilot project.
“When my father was working on the main idea of the film, he made a video maquette of the film instead of writing a screenplay and played the role of Mr. Badiei in a car traveling in Sohanak, a village near Tehran,” Kiarostami’s son, Bahman, had written in a statement about the film.
The event will be running until March 13 at the forum.
Source:Tehran Times