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Festival: Cinema Verite Ends in Iran
Posted on Saturday, November 01 @ 18:03:57 EST by tim milfull
The second Iran International Documentary Films Festival (Cinema Verite), which is the most prominent film festival of Persian Gulf region, adjourned on Thursday in Tehran after announcing the winners of national and international sections. The 2008 Cinema Verite hosted producers, journalists, documentarists and cinema experts from 84 countries worldwide, while the most of participants belonged to Poland, India, UK, France, Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, Japan, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and Brazil.
The auditoriums of International Vahdat Hall, Palestine Theater and Freedom Theater screened almost 200-documentaries from international filmmakers who gathered in Iran to expose their talent, capability and skills of displaying the "truth" and "reality" through the means of visual techniques and cinematic knowledge. The closing ceremony, which was attended by hundreds of guests, domestic filmmakers, reporters and cinema analysts, ended the prominent festival by awarding filmmakers from six countries.
World-renowned Polish filmmaker Marcin Koszalka earned the award for the best over-60 minutes film at the festival and received the honorary diploma, statue of verity and a 5000€ prize. His delicate film, Existence drew an eye-catching and in-depth outline of Jerzy Nowak's real life. Nowak is a distinguished 84-year-old Polish actor who decided that after death, his body should be used for the benefit of science. This precious documentary follows Mr. Nowak as he makes this most personal and final decision, and reveals his own dilemmas and thoughts about death.
Marcin Koszalka is a graduate from the Kieslowski Faculty of Radio and Television at the University of Silesia, and has voyaged around the world with Existence, winning the Inter-religious Jury Award in the Switzerland's Visions du Reel film festival of 2008 before coming to Iran. Various films by Koszalka have been displayed at international film festivals including this year's DOK Leipzig film festival, Bulgarian Sofia Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Dead Body, Till It Hurts, User-Friendly Death and All Day Together are among his former notable documentaries, which were produced between 2006 and 2008.
The other laureate was the young Indian director Nishtha Jain who has been named the only Asian winner of festival and earned the honorary diploma, Verity statue and a 2,000€ award for the best short documentary. Prior to this, the Mumbai-based independent director has won several international awards for her under-60-minutes documentary Lakshmi and Me in various festivals. The impressive film, narrates the story of a poor, miserable woman working as a servant for her employer, who is also another woman. Both have a relative friendly relationship, but what makes the film so effective and eye-catching is the chain of unrelated and challenging accidents facing Lakshmi.
The other prize for the best feature length documentary went to veteran Swiss filmmaker, Moroccan-born Fernand Melgar. The last prize went to Victor Asliuk for the political documentary Belarusian Waltz, which criticises the tyranny and dictatorship in the political system of Belarus.
However, the most attractive part of the festival was honouring veteran US filmmaker Richard Leacock, who is one of the pioneers of direct cinema, has studied physics in the Harvard University and later developed an innovative style of filmmaking based on synchronous sound and the use of lightweight cameras. In 1984, the German documentarist Klaus Wildenhahn produced a documentary film reviewing the life of Leacock, and paying tribute to 45-years of his creative efforts. That film was the first documentary produced about the featured verite director himself.
In the closing ceremony of Cinema Verite festival, the Iranian Ministry of Culture honored Master Leacock with the special trophy and reward for his sincere and intellectual struggles to improve the purity of cinema and refining the spiritual values of documentary filmmaking. Leacock went on the stage hoping not to shed tears, and said with an excited, shaking voice, "This is the first time that I have come to Iran. I can not forget the affable compassion of its people; I will be proud of my every moment in Iran," and that was how the Cinema Verite was closed officially by introducing the laureates and glorifying a master of documentary filmmaking.
The last event was a four-hour visit to Iran's Carpet Museum, which allowed participants and foreign guests to learn more about the promising and historical art of carpet-weaving, which is a national art belonging to Iranian people since 500BC.
Reviewed by Kourosh Ziabari 
