There are a lot of opinions about the various festivals hosted in Iran. Please note that anything I say about the FiFF is my own opinion and not fact. I know the festival to extent that I have read about and been in contact with it. The festival takes place in Tehran. Its named a world festival and as such other cities within Iran should benefit it from it as well. People in other cities should be able to watch the movies screened at it. The screening of foreign films in Iran is a great achievement, we rarely have had the opportunity to watch such films in Iran in the recent past. We are definitely not like other countries, in that the movies being shown around the world don’t find their way on to our screens and our public can’t watch them at the corner cinema. The FiFF is the only time where this can happen during the year. Still the festival only runs for a short time and doesn’t have the capacity to show all of the worlds latest films. Many believe that screening foreign films in Iran, damages our own cinema. Can’t screening such films lead to a healthy competition in Iran’s cinema? We have to move towards empowering Iranian cinema and to do that we have to take risks and compete with films from elsewhere. I hope that Reza Mirkarimi and his team achieve their goal as soon as possible. The Fajr Film Festival claimed to be an international event from its inception. Meaning that it focused on foreign films as well. I remember that we would screen the films of Tarkovsky and Bergman. We are not at the same level as the A-list festivals of the world and we shouldn’t be satisfied about it. We have to move towards a day when all of the important international movies of the day are being shown in Iran. The FiFF is on the right path and achieving great things, but we should have started down this path sooner and achieved much more by now. It must be said that deficiencies exist in various aspects of the country and not just cinema. We have to spend a lot more money to bring the quality of the festival to where we need it to be. Anyone who is criticizing that festival has become international, doesn’t understand its importance. If even a little of this budget is taken away then we would move backwards from where we are.
*note Verbal
