Asia Pacific Screen Awards by DOCUNIGHT

Festival Selections:
Asia Pacific Screen Awards

In its new program in partnership with the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Docunight will showcase four outstanding documentaries by Iranian filmmakers. The Asia Pacific Screen Awards celebrates cinema and filmmaking in the Asia Pacific region and promotes these outstanding films to a global audience. The initiative has brought a great deal of attention to Iranian cinema in the last decade.

Our new program features four Iranian documentaries, all of which have been awarded prizes at APSA: The Lost Land (Vahid Mousaian, 2006), Tinar (Mahdi Moniri, 2009), Amin (Shahin Parhami, 2010), and The Unseen (Behzad Nalbandi, 2019). These films bring to light extraordinarily candid subject matter and provide an alluring window into the creative processes of these inspiring directors, whose works have the remarkable effect of changing viewpoints and misconceptions.

The Unsceen

کاغذپاره‌ها
Directed by Behzad Nalbandi • 2019 • Iran
During the times when Tehran hosts foreign dignitaries, the local authorities clean up Tehran’s urban image through an ‘urban beautification’ process which includes the rounding up of unsavory characters from the city streets; i.e. drug addicts and prostitutes. The men are released after a few days but the women are kept as wards of the state in perpetuity. They are sent to holding centers on the outskirts of the city where no records are kept by the social workers; these women cease to exist.
A friend of my sister, happened to work in one of these detention centers, and she helped me go there with a recorder and interview some of the women without any officials. I explained to each woman what I was doing and asked for their permission and promised them not to film them.
This animated documentary attempts to give a just voice to homeless women taken off the streets against their will, stripped of their rights and kept incarcerated until their lives end.

Amin

امین
Directed by Shahin Parhami • 2011 • Iran
Amin is the story of an ancient musical tradition and one man’s struggle to preserve it. It is told using a unique approach to documentary storytelling that challenges the boundaries of fiction and reality. Amin Aghaie is a young modern nomad from the south of Iran. He has dedicated his life to preserving, documenting and teaching the unique musical tradition of his people, the Qashqai, a tradition on the verge of extinction. Despite the fact that Amin’s family face steep financial, cultural and political obstacles, they are devoted to their art and culture and express that by supporting the work of their talented musician son. Every summer, Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son’s education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky’s Conservatory in Kiev, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.

Tinar

تینار
Directed by Mahdi Moniri • 2009 • Iran
A child in the southern forests of Babol has to protect his flock without any help. Desperately lonely, he endures harsh winters and physical hardships, while dreaming of a different future.

The Lost Land

سرزمین گمشده
Directed by Vahid Mousaian • 2007 • Iran
This documentary film is about the political and social events that happened after 1941 that caused the ‘North Neighbour Country’ to penetrate into Iran, forcing some generations to immigrate and live in the camps of Siberia.