Cinema Verite to honor top Iranian film expert Akbar Alemi

The 14th edition of the Cinema Vérité, Iran’s major international festival for documentary films, is to pay homage to late Iranian film critic, documentary filmmaker, and television presenter Akbar Alemi.

Alemi, who died at the age of 75 due to the COVID-19 infection, was one of the influential figures in IRIB and one of the pioneers of documentary filmmaking in Iran and presented modern methods in the documentary genre.

He helped develop academic cinema during the years it was about to fade away in the country with his TV programs ‘Other Side of the Coin’, ‘Seventh Art’ and ‘Beyond Cinema’ during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Alemi shot numerous documentaries and has also written and translated several books on photography.

Alemi, who had gone to a hospital in Tehran to make a documentary about the coronavirus, contracted the disease.

The 14th Cinema Verite will be running online from December 15 to 22 in Tehran.

The festival will run in different sections, including National, International, and Martyr Avini Prize, Entrepreneurship Documentary Competition, CoronaVirus Special Section, Side Sections and commemorations.

The national competition section comprises the short, mid-length and feature-length documentaries while the international section of this edition of Cinema Verite will be held in non-competition format due to the spread of coronavirus.

The international section of the festival also enjoys various non-competition sections such as Special Displays, Mirror of a Festival, Portrait, Perspective of One Country Documentary Cinema, Chile Documentary Cinema, Masters of 2020 as well as 13 Editions & 13 Films.

A number of top Iranian and international documentarians and critics will be holding online workshops and panel discussions during the festival.

International figures to attend the online event include Betsy A. McLane, Bill Nichols and James Bertrand Longley along with famous Iranian documentarians Mehrdad Oskoee and Farhad Varahram.

Also read:

Cinema Verite to honor 3 Iranian documentarians

MM/MM