In an address to the festival’s first press conference on Sunday, Hojjatollah Nazeri added the significant number of stop motion films participating in the first edition of the event “will make us more determined to continue holding the fest in coming years”.

He noted that the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has created new conditions in the world and Iran, saying under the present circumstances, the need is strongly felt for appropriate online contents, as a severe dearth of such items is currently faced.

Nazeri added the festival’s judges are among the most prominent Iranian animators and experts in this field, who made a great fuss when selecting the films.

He listed some of them as Abdollah Alimorad (animator), Bahram Azimi (filmmaker and animator), and Amir Mashhadi-Abbas, the head of the Cinema Center of the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents.

The fest’s secretary said among the goals of holding the event are producing appropriate and creative content for children and adolescents, discovering young talents and training them, and producing appropriate animated films suitable for being shared in cyberspace.

Speaking at the conference, Behnam Bahadori, the art secretary of the festival, said the event can be claimed to be the first homemade stop motion film festival in the world.

He added 431 stop motion films from across the country were sent to the secretariat of the festival, of which 87 were selected for participation in the event’s national competition section.

Bahadori put the number of foreign submitted works at 1,326 from 96 countries, of which 44 from 25 states were chosen to take part in the festival’s international competition section.

He noted that in addition, following a final assessment of the foreign works, 10 stop motion films were selected.  

Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back.


Source: Iran Daily