Busan filmfest showing Iran’s ‘The Absent Director’

Iranian feature ‘The Absent Director’ has been competing at the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in South Korea.

Written by Naghmeh Samini and directed by Arvand Dashtaray, the 85-minute suspense/mystery film is competing at New Currents section of the 26th edition of the South Korean event.

The New Currents is a section dedicated to up-and-coming Asian filmmakers’ first or second features that bestows two films with a New Currents Award.

‘The Absent Director’ is in one continuous take. It follows the various members of a young Iranian theater company during their secret rehearsals of Macbeth at their director’s home in Tehran, while he works with them remotely from Paris via video call.

Their dream is to submit the play to the Edinburgh Theater Festival on time, but things get complicated when their personal conflicts escalate, and their hidden agendas come to light. The heated tensions reach the climax when a mysterious tragedy threatens to bring their work to a complete halt.

The cast list of the movie includes the director, Marene Van Holk, Azadeh Mirzaee, and Tahere Hezaveh.

Born in 1981, Dashtaray founded a theatrical company in 2002 and has produced more than 25 theatrical pieces so far. Among them, ‘Let’s Swing a Little’ (2011) won the Critical Stage at the Fadjr International Theatre Festival.

He is also famous for the experimental performance style and developed a huge project under the title ‘London, Rome, Teheran, Amsterdam: Reconsider Your Image of Me’. ‘The Absent Director’ is Dashtaray’s feature debut film.

Founded in 1996 and being held annually in Haeundae-gu, Busan, the BIFF is one of the most significant film festivals in Asia.

This year’s edition of the event, also hosting Iran’s ‘Cloudy Man’, ‘A Hero’, ‘Ballad of a White Cow’, and ‘Asteroid’, has been slated for October 6-15.

MG/AG