Canada’s Rendezvous with Madness festival to screen Iranian films

The 25th edition of the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival in Canada has scheduled to screen two films from Iran.

The event will screen Mehrdad Oskouei’s award-winning and much admired ‘Starless Dreams’ and ‘Nobody Dies Here’ directed by Hossein Kondori on November 5 and 7, respectively.

‘Starless Dreams’ follows a group of under-18-year-old girls taken into a rehabilitation and detention center on the outskirts of Tehran for a variety of reasons ranging from drug dealing and trafficking to pick-pocketing and manslaughter.

Though bored with their incarcerated life they are, nevertheless, scared about what might happen to them once outside; as the New Year approaches, they all hope to celebrate it with their families.

Director Oskouei, one of Iran’s most prominent filmmakers, spent seven years securing access to this all-female facility, and he makes the awkwardness of being a male filmmaker in their environment a poignant and powerful aspect of his project.

The 76-minute doc has grabbed a number of prestigious awards and titles from various film events. Just in 2016, the film won the Amnesty International Film Prize at the 66th Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlinale-Generation 14plus in Germany as well as the True Vision Award at the 13th True/False Film Festival in the US.

Oskouei’s production has also received the Grierson Award for the best documentary at the 60th BFI London Film Festival and the Children’s Rights Award at the 31st Osnabruck Independent Film Festival in October.

The 78-minute ‘Nobody Dies Here’ depicts the loneliness of a conscript in a powerful and cinematically suggestive study with the effects of prolonged solitude on the vulnerable mind.

To fulfill his military training requirements, a soldier accepts a post at a remote border patrol station. Really not much more than a dilapidated stone ruin, the station is a study in neglect and isolation.

But the worst part is the isolation. Left for weeks at a time with nothing but his memories and fears to keep him company, the soldier begins to wonder whether he’s losing his grip on reality.

There’s a woman from the valley below who keeps turning up at the strangest times, and there are noises in the night which suggest that the soldier might not be as alone as it first appeared.

The Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival, the first and largest mental health film festival in the world launched in 1993, holds review sessions after each screening which is attended by filmmakers, mental health professionals and people who have lived through mental health experiences.

The 25th edition of the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival is slated for November 3-11, 2017, in Toronto, Canada.

MG/MG