ifilm's exclusive report on Iranian feature ‘Eczema’

Watch ifilm's exclusive report on the Iranian feature film ‘Eczema’ directed by Mehran Mahdavian, starring Komail Alipour and Diba Zahedi.

The following are highlights of the report.

ifilm: Mehran Mahdavian, the director, was the student of the Oscar award winning director Asghar Farhadi, and he didn’t make the movie until he got the confirmation of the project from his master, Asghar Farhadi.

Mahdavian: The idea for making ‘Exzema’ shaped in 2011. Back then, I was a student of Asghar Farhadi, the great Iranian director.

I presented my proposal there. We were supposed to make a short film at the end of each semester as our proposal.

When I talked to him about my proposal, he told me that it can be turned into a feature film.

So, we decided not to make it at that time and I worked on another screenplay.

Over these years, I’ve been working on ‘Eczema’ and finally I was able to make it last year.

ifilm: The movie ‘Eczema’ is filmed in a fixed location but in a mobile setting in a car.

Mahdavian: From the very beginning, I wanted to shoot this film in a car. It wasn’t as if we wanted to choose a fixed single location because of our low-budget. No.

When ‘Eczema’ was formed the only thing that caused it to form was the single location. When the idea for making this film came to my mind, the first thing I thought about was how good it would be if a film and a story happens only in a car.

That’s why I wanted the camera to stay in the car and the whole story to happen in a car...

Eczema is a skin condition and the philosophy of our film is very close to this skin condition.

This is something that exists in the heart of our film.

When you form your life based on a lie, it’s likely that your life will be ruined at any moment.

‘Eczema’ is just like this, it begins as a minor skin condition and it can be easily cured but if it’s ignored, it can spread through the whole body and has very dangerous side-effects.

I tried to show this skin condition’s side-effects and the consequences of lying and keeping things secret parallel to each other.

This is where the title ‘Eczema’ comes from.

AI/AG