Filmsaaz

During a chaotic night at an underground Tehran rave disrupted by the morality police and the sudden outbreak of war, a queer youth chooses to retreat into a bubble of romantic illusion with their partner, just to survive the brutal reality outside.

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In 1778, a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in exile in Paris: reeling from his mother’s death, he spent his days writing scatalogical music and drowning in libertine excess. In this genre-defying ‘audiovisual opera’, Mozart’s life becomes a portal into that of Wolfgang, an Iranian artist navigating similar extremes as he too is exiled in Paris: the city where everyone says his dreams will come true, and praises him for escaping the censorship of his homeland.

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The Paléo Festival – with its history, enraptured crowds, protagonists from all walks of life and questions about the future – is the subject of a captivating documentary series by students of the HEAD and the ECAL. Their four capsules, including archival footage, bring the sounds of this essential Swiss institution to life.

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The website of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is crammed with filmed sermons and speeches. Appropriating these official archives, Saleh Kashefi – exiled in Switzerland – has created a political fiction that is both hard-hitting and ambiguous. We bear direct witness to the dictator’s last moments before his downfall, as whispers fill the streets.

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Young Iranian director Salef Kashefi creates a poetic diary out of pieces of his life in Paris. Graceful young faces filmed ever so tenderly, the golden radiance of religious paintings, trivialities of a disjointed daily life overtaken by a gnawing sadness… Each shot is a note whose vibrancy is only enhanced by the sound material, as a ghostly double, made of thick silences and repetitive motifs, melodic apparitions and echoes. Development is the translation on film of a melancholy that is sensitively distilled from the bottom of a bathtub. (Claire Lasolle)

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During a chaotic night at an underground Tehran rave disrupted by the morality police and the sudden outbreak of war, a queer youth chooses to retreat into a bubble of romantic illusion with their partner, just to survive the brutal reality outside.

Open details →

In 1778, a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in exile in Paris: reeling from his mother’s death, he spent his days writing scatalogical music and drowning in libertine excess. In this genre-defying ‘audiovisual opera’, Mozart’s life becomes a portal into that of Wolfgang, an Iranian artist navigating similar extremes as he too is exiled in Paris: the city where everyone says his dreams will come true, and praises him for escaping the censorship of his homeland.

Open details →