Ciné Junior fest in France honors Iran’s ‘Asteroid’

Iranian feature film ‘Asteroid’ has been honored at the 2022 Ciné Junior Festival in France.

Written and directed by Mehdi Hosseinivand, the feature film succeeded to receive a grant of €1,000 as well as the Young Jury Prize of the international feature film competition section at the 32nd edition of the French event.

The 77-minute ‘Asteroid’ is about a 12-year-old boy named Ebrahim who lives with his mother and five siblings of all ages in a two-room shack in the heart of the desert, far away from a village.

Ebrahim's mother hopes that one day her eldest son and her husband, who went to work two years ago and never returned, will return and the heavy burden of life will be lifted from Ebrahim's shoulders.

Apart from feeding the children and getting identity cards for them, Ebrahim and his mother are busy building a house in the village so that they don't have to walk from the desert to the village every day. Eventually, they manage to build and move to their new house in the village.

Hadi Kazemi, Ghazal Shojaee, and Ebrahim Zarozehi make the cast list of the movie.

Hosseinivand’s debut feature made its premiere at the 2021 Fajr International Film Festival in Iran, where it grabbed the best film award.

It was also screened at the Ajyal Film Festival in Qatar and the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea.

Established in 1991, the Ciné Junior Festival is aimed to provide education for young audiences.

The ambition of the festival, as put by the official website of the event, is “to allow children and teenagers to discover quality French and foreign films and to help concretely with the distribution of films that can participate in a real artistic awakening of young audiences.”

The 2022 edition of the festival was held on February 2-14.

MM/MG