The 33rd British film festival in Dinard (Ille-et-Vilaine) ends this Sunday, October 2 with in particular around thirty feature films screened, among them the latest film by the Anglo-Iranian director.
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The jury ofhe Dinard British Film Festival, chaired this year by José Garcia, promised a rich 33rd edition “of original nuggets”. Promise kept with Winnersthe latest film by British-Iranian director Hassan Nazer.
For more than 20 years, Hassan Nazer has lived in Aberdeen, Scotland. But the Iranian director maintains a powerful anchor with his country of origin. In each of his films, Utopia (2015), We’re All Sinner (2013) and Black day (2011), it narrates the complicated stages that its protagonists go through.
Winners, his latest feature film tells the story of a little film-loving boy of Afghan origin who accidentally discovers an Oscar statuette in a village in the Iranian desert. A tender and realistic epic reminiscent of the cinema of the greatest Iranian directors, Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami or even Asgar Farhadi. “I wanted to make a film in homage to Iranian artists and my favorite directors”, he says before adding: “Throughout the film there are references to these filmmakers and what happened in this cinema with today’s reality as a backdrop. So this film is a bit of a history of Iranian cinema melee to the story of my childhood.
During the presentation of his film, the director Hassan Nazer took advantage of the session to declare his support for the women’s cause in his country in the context he is currently going through. Winners does not yet have a distributor in France. By offering it great visibility, the Dinard festival could well help resolve this issue.