The Farabi Cinema Foundation tasked with selecting Iran’s contestant for the best foreign-language film category has announced its choice of ‘No Date, No Signature,’ which won best director and best actor at the 2017 Venice Film Festival
The choice of ‘No Date, No Signature’ was vindicated by its success abroad and “the efforts of its distributor” to bring the movie to screens in the United States, Farabi said. But the ultra-conservative press was unimpressed. “Like the strategy used by Trump in interviews and tweets to depict Iran as a nation abandoned by hope and mired in poverty and misery, ‘No Date, No Signature’, a most bitter and dark film, has been chosen for the Oscars,” Javan newspaper said in a commentary. It said the foundation had squandered “a golden opportunity” to enlighten the outside world on the values of Iran by nominating another movie, “Damascus Time,” on its battle against jihadists in Syria. Director Ebrahim Hatamikia’s film, funded by the Revolutionary Guards, the country’s ideological army, has been a hit at the Tehran box office. After three films were shortlisted from a 110-strong field, “the decisive factor that made ‘No Date, No Signature’ the best choice was its professional and effective foreign distributor which the others did not have,” said Houshang Golmakani, a critic with “Film Magazine,” a monthly on Iranian movies he co-founded. The subject matter makes it “a caustic film” as regards its portrayal of life in Iran, he told AFP. “But art is not a matter of touting for your country.” In 2017, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi won his second Oscar for best foreign movie with ‘The Salesman,’ but he boycotted the awards ceremony in Los Angeles in protest of Trump’s controversial policies on immigration.
Published in Daily Times, September 21st 2018.
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