"Persian Carpet" panel

The Sunday, Sept. 2nd press conference for “Persian Carpet” at the Montreal Film Festival, which took place in the mall of the Hyatt Regency complex, brought seven of the filmmakers (the complete group being: Behruz Afkhami, Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Bahram Beizai, Jafar Panahi, Kamal Tabrizi, Seifollah Daad, Mojtaba Raee, Nor-ol-Din Zarrin-Kelk, Khosro Sinaee, Bahman Farmanara, Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi, Dariush Mehrjui, Reza Mir-Karimi, Mohammad Reza Honardmand.) The festive occasion and unique grouping of filmmakers did not deter some questioners from some challenging queries during the Q & A. Filmmaker Khosrow Sinai did his best to assure one woman that his film (which dealt with the centrality of carpet-making and horse-rearing in the Turkmen culture of Northern Iran) was not participating in the intentional silencing of female voices associated with the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, a gentleman speaking in farsi wanted to know from filmmaker and Persian Carpet producer Reza Mir-Karimi why several of the shorts seemed so similar and why the quality of the film print was so poor. Mir-Karimi apologized for the relative quality of the print, promising that he was working on getting a better one for future screenings. As to the similarities between some of the films, he reiterated that the understanding from the outset of the project was that contributing filmmakers would be given complete freedom to make any film they wanted, without knowledge of what their colleagues were doing. As to recurring motifs between films, it is, after all, a film about the Persian carpet. (Photo by Claudia Leger/text by Robert Avila)

09.05.2007