Taiwanese film festival screens 4 Iranian films

The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (2017 TGHFF) in Taiwan has screened four titles from Iran.

‘A Man of Integrity’ (AKA Lerd) is a 117-minute fiction about a man who refuses to bribe his way out of trouble caused by powerful economic and political forces.

Reza, having distanced himself from the urban quagmire, leads a simple life along with his wife and sole son, somewhere in a remote village in Northern Iran. He spends his days working in his gold fish farm.

Nearby, a private company with close links to the government and local authorities has taken control of nearly every aspect of regional life. Its shareholders, accumulating wealth, power and economic rents, have been pushing local farmers and small owners to dilapidate their belongings, farms and estates, to the benefit of the company’s influential network and its monopoly.

It is under their pressure that many villagers themselves have become local rings of the larger network of corruption.

Reza Akhlaqirad, Soudabeh Beizaee, and Nasim Adabi star in the film that has been screened at a number of prestigious global events, including Sydney Film Festival, Midnight Sun Film Festival, New Horizons International Film Festival, the Bogota International Film Festival in Colombia, the Film Festival Gent in Belgium, the Batumi International Art-House Film Festival in Georgia, the 22nd Busan International Film Festival in South Korea and the 70th Cannes Film Festival in France, the latter of which bestowed the Un Certain Regard award on the film.

The Taiwanese event also paid tribute to late-great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami with the screening of ‘24 Frames’ and ‘Take Me Home’, both directed by Kiarostami, as well as ‘76 Minutes and 15 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami’ by Seifollah Samadian in the Master Class section.

Launched in 1980 as a non-competitive showcase, the TGHFF is the largest film festival in Taiwan. It aims at introducing prominent cinema from around the world, in order to promote cinema as an art form and to enhance intercultural understanding through cinema.

The 2017 edition of the TGHFF was held on November 3-24, 2017.

MG/AI