ifilm exclusive on 'Midday Adventures'

Watch ifilm's exclusive report on Iranian film ‘Midday Adventures’ directed by Mohammad-Hossein Mahdavian and produced by Seyyed Mahmoud Razavi.

Below are highlights of the report.

ifilm: Historical pictures should be able to perfectly depict the atmosphere of the relevant era; in this case, an era not so long ago – the 1980s.

Mahdavian: You know, we had two successful projects: ‘The Last Days of Winter’ and ‘Standing in the Dust’. Both of them take place in the 1980s.

From this point of view, we knew everything about the subject matter, so we didn’t have to begin everything from scratch.

Moreover, Mr. Razavi had already experienced working on ‘Cyanide’ and he helped us a lot.

Razavi: ‘The Midday Event’ is indebted to ‘Cyanide’. First, ‘Cyanide’ was made. The atmosphere was prepared for accepting this kind of film.

Then, ‘The Midday Event’ was made, which is way better than ‘Cyanide’ considering the historical, cinematic and political issues.

ifilm: This is the second time that Mohammad-Hossein Mahdavian has won the Fajr Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award.

Razavi: I work on genres that have not been generally welcomed by the audiences in the cinema industry so far...

I don’t claim that I know the audience well; no one can claim such a thing.

Mahdavian: While writing a screenplay and making a film, our main concern in the audience; so, their reaction matters to us most...

We begin making a film based on the feelings we have for the audience. And we got a good response for the last two films.

Our film was among the five films honored by the people’s vote in last year’s Fajr Film Festival and this year it won the People’s Choice Award at the Fajr Film Festival.

ifilm: The initial idea for making this movie and recounting the fervent days after the revolution belong to Seyyed Mahmoud Razavi, and then it turned into a script by Mr. [Ebrahim] Amini and Mohammad-Hossein Mahdavian.

Razavi: It was the month of Ramadan last year that the issue of the Haft-e-Tir martyrs and the Republican Party’s headquarters explosion were brought up.

I had access to some sources because of the movie ‘Cyanide’. So, I was able to expand my research and study about Haft-e-Tir martyrs too.

AI/AG