Bani-Etemad being honored in Austria

Iranian filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad has been being honored at the Austrian Film Museum, reviewing some of her works.

Holding a retrospective of her works, twelve drama and documentary films by the 68-year-old filmmaker are being reviewed in the program.

“She’s foreign, she’s a woman and she’s still alive. Can a Rakhshan Bani-Etemad season at the BFI draw the crowds?” reads a statement for the retrospective by the museum.

The quote above is referring to the UK press during the British Film Institute’s 2008 retrospective of the veteran filmmaker.

The program titled ‘The May Lady’, being held on January 27-February 28, is reviewing ‘See You Tomorrow Elina’, ‘The Blue Veiled’, ‘Narges’, ‘Under the Skin of the City’, ‘We Are Half of Iran’s Population’, ‘Our Times’, ‘Angels of the House of Sun’, ‘Gilaneh’, ‘Mainline’, ‘All My Trees’, ‘Hey Humans’,  ‘Touran Khanom’ and ‘The Tales’.

Bani-Etemad studied film and, shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution, started her professional career working for Iranian TV.

After three early commercial features that approach social issues from a satirical angle, she found a strong personal voice with her bleak, hard-biting social melodrama ‘Narges’ in 1991, an instant classic both in Iran and internationally and the first part of the director’s informal ‘City Trilogy’, which she much later continued with ‘The May Lady’ in 1998 and ‘Under the Skin of the City’ in 2000.

Over the past fifteen years, documentary filmmaking has become Bani-Etemad’s primary mode of expression. Her films focus on what she perceives as major social anomalies.

Read more:

Rakhshan Banietemad named among pioneering women directors

MG/MG