‘Willow Tree’, ‘Children of Heaven’ to screen in Turkey

The director will be in Konya from May 3 to 6 to attend the screening session of his award-winning flicks.

Majidi will receive the special award of the festival, said member of the International Mevlana Foundation, Forouzandeh Arbabi.

‘The Willow Tree’, which was aired by ifilm, is about a blind middle-aged university professor named Yousef who regains his vision after surgery. Everyone is overjoyed, except for Yousef, who realizes his life isn't what he'd imagined.

As a touching and uplifting movie about compassion and familial bonds, Majid Majidi’s ‘Children of Heaven’ was the first Iranian film nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1998.

‘Children of Heaven’ tells the story of a little boy named Ali who loses his sister’s shoes. Knowing their family is poor, the siblings try not to reveal the shoes are lost until they can get them back by trying a new way to win a new pair.

Sufisin festival screens only films with religious and mystic themes in the city of Konya, a 1000-year culture and civilization capital, the center of Mowlana studies and spiritual love.

Iranian director Reza Mirkarimi was the only Iranian director who received Turkey’s plaque of honor at the first edition of the festival, held last year. He was invited to attend the festival as director of ‘Under the Moonlight’, which was highly welcomed.

The festival is slated to be held from May 2-5, 2019 in line with the arrival anniversary of Mowlana and his family to Konya.

Mowlana AKA Rumi was a 13th century poet Persian poet, Islamic jurist, and theologian. Hi is a widely-read poet in Iran and other Persian-speaking countries. His English-translated works have also become quite popular in the West.

Rumi is a descriptive name meaning "the Roman" since he lived most parts of his life in Anatolia which had been part of the Roman Empire until the Seljuq conquest two centuries earlier.

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