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By Ayoub Derraza
Rabat – Iranian cinema was the star of Rabat International Festival of Author Cinema.
Two Iranian films won half of the festival’s awards. Three of the awards were given to Jamshid Mahmoudi’s film A Few Cubic Meters of Love. Hassiba Ibrahimi won Best Female Interpretation and Saed Sohaeli won Best Male Interpretation.
The social issue was centered on forbidden relationships between Afghanis and Pakistanis. In the movie, a factory manager illegally employs Afghan refugees as workers, among them Abdelsalam and his daughter, Marona. Saber, a young Iranian, also works there, and every afternoon secretly meets Marona in a container on the factory grounds. There they can spend time together, play innocent games, and fantasize about other realities.
Jamshid Mahmoudi graduated from Tehran’s prestigious University of the Arts and has worked on a number of shorts and television shows produced by his brother. Shooting in a location where Afghan refugees actual live and work, Mahmoudi displays a dynamic, muscular style of direction that makes this dusty, dirty landscape as vivid as the backdrop in “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Safi Yazdanian’s What’s the Time in Your World? was also made significant by winning Best Screenplay. The movie tells the story of a woman returning from Paris to Rasht, her hometown, after a very long time. She learns about people she left behind and reconnects with those who moved on with their lives as well as those who did not, all while still living in the past.
Moroccan cinema was not absent in the ceremony. Tala Hadid’s The Narrow Frame of Midnight won two awards, the Audience Award and Best Arabian Movie.
Peace to Us in Our Dreams, by the Lithuanian director, Sharunas Bartas, received the Critic’s Jury Prize.
